How this desk works, and who runs it.

Every edition starts from the same four inputs. None of them is a newsletter, a wire summary or another analyst's read. We go to the publisher.

1. 01

   Official channels.

   About 90 registered channels: central ministries and regulators, the People's Bank of China, the 31 mainland provincial governments, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. Each is fetched five times a day on Beijing time (06:00, 10:30, 14:00, 18:30 and 22:00). A channel that stops answering is counted in the public health feed, not hidden.

2. 02

   First-party numbers.

   Policy rates, the government yield curve, the CNY central parity, Stock Connect flows, iron ore settlements, money and credit aggregates, trade and price prints. Each is read from the institution that publishes it (PBOC, ChinaBond, CFETS, HKEX, SGX, NBS), not from a data vendor. A number we cannot fetch is omitted, never estimated.

3. 03

   Institutional press.

   Party organs, domestic financial and industry media, the English-facing state outlets, and the Western papers that cover China closely. These tell us how a move is being framed at home and abroad. They are labelled as press, and they never stand in for the primary document.

4. 04

   Platform attention.

   The trending boards on Baidu, Weibo and WeChat. Attention is not news, so these items are shown as attention: what people in China are looking at, alongside what the state is saying and what the market is doing.

The same steps run every edition, in the same order. The machine does the reading and the first draft. The rules decide what is allowed to be published.

Translation

Chinese headlines and documents are translated by DeepSeek, a language model. The original Chinese stays attached to every item so a reader can check the translation.

Ranking

Stories are ranked by a deterministic rule: how many independent sources carry them, which institution published them, and whether an archive baseline moved. No model decides what leads.

Baselines

Every numeric series is scored against its own 30-day and 90-day history in our archive. A move is called unusual only when it is unusual against that record, and the size of the move is printed.

Draft

A language model writes the reading of the day from the ranked stories and the baseline notes, under written editorial rules: cite the item you rely on, do not restate the headline, do not guess at causes.

Lint gates

Deterministic checks run on the draft before anything is published: every sentence must cite a ranked item, numbers must match the feed, template wording is rejected. A draft that fails is replaced by a fact-only edition built from the ranked items.

Record

Each edition is archived at its time slot and never rewritten. Dossiers carry a revision number and a citation on every claim. Forecasts declare how they resolve before they are published and are scored in public.

Today is free in full: the current edition, the current reading of every dossier, the public forecast board, and the public data feeds. Memory is the product: past editions, dossier revisions, the evidence record, archive search, Ask, exports and API are Professional.

A labelled advertisement appears on the free Snapshot page and on public daily editions and dossiers that clear a length floor (400 words for an edition, 350 for a dossier). Shorter public pages carry none. Professional members never see advertising. Advertising never influences what we cover or how we rank it; the ranking is a fixed rule and the ad is placed after the content is written. Our editorial standards set this out in full, along with how to report an error.

A market move or a spike in attention next to an official statement can strengthen or weaken a reading. It does not prove why something happened. We print observation, inference and uncertainty as separate things, and we say what evidence would change the read. Important decisions should go back to the cited document and to qualified professional advice. This site is information, not advice.

China Snapshot is edited by Tristan McInnis, Managing Partner of Inner Chapter, a China-anchored qualitative research consultancy, based in Shanghai. He sets the source list and the analytical rules the system applies, reviews published editions and corrects them, and answers for corrections. The machine reads and drafts; the editor decides what the rules are and is accountable for the result.

The site is published by CHINA SNAPSHOT LIMITED, a company incorporated in Hong Kong (Business Registration No. 80961828), with its registered office at Unit 2904-05, 29/F, Universal Trade Centre, 3 Arbuthnot Road, Hong Kong S.A.R. Write to contact@china-snapshot.com for general enquiries, or see the contact page for the support and privacy addresses.