AI & Algorithm Governance

The rulebook is no longer entirely frozen. After three quarters in which Beijing published no new algorithm or generative-AI rule, the domestic legislative track has re-opened — not at the Cyberspace Administration of China, but at the Ministry of Justice. Caixin reports the ministry has said it will accelerate work on an AI law in 2026, and that Zhejiang University legal and digital-governance scholars have released a 99-article model AI law ¹. That is the first substantive movement on Chinese AI obligations since the spring, and it matters because it opens a second, rights-and-liability channel alongside the security-and-content channel that has so far dominated.

The draft's content tells you which frame is being argued for. It would require human review of AI-assisted medical decisions, give consumers the right to challenge consequential automated decisions, and impose record-keeping duties on developers and providers ¹. That is a liability architecture addressed to courts and consumers, not the filing-and-review architecture the CAC has used for generative AI. It is still an academic text with no government imprimatur, so the operative question is whether a State Council or CAC draft follows in 2026 and which frame it absorbs. But the "governing by infrastructure and export licence rather than disclosed regulation" reading now needs qualification: a statute is being drafted in public.

Promotion meanwhile keeps compounding, and its vocabulary has consolidated around "AI+". In Shanghai on Oct 18, mayor Zhu Zhongming told Hillhouse founder Zhang Lei and a group of multinational executives that the city is building the Shanghai (Yangtze Delta) international sci-tech innovation centre around three lead industries — integrated circuits, biomedicine and AI — and is pursuing "AI+life health" and "AI+manufacturing", explicitly inviting foreign firms to expand investment and train talent in those areas ². The same "AI+" label carries the rural programme, with the agriculture ministry and the Chinese Association of Agricultural Science Societies convening their annual forum on Nov 26–28 in Guangzhou under the theme "AI+ agriculture and rural modernisation" ³. Below that sits the doctrinal layer unchanged: Xi Jinping's Oct 16 Ulanqab call for deep digital-real integration, read by People's Daily through 因地制宜, and the NDRC's 19-task new-quality-productive-forces charter as 15th Five-Year-Plan opening-year guidance ^4,5.

The compute hedge is intact. The all-domestic 100,000-card supercluster at the National Supercomputing Internet core node on Zhengzhou's Beilong Lake, built in July and shown at the Shenzhen high-performance computing conference, is running ten published applications — including a Tsinghua river-and-ecology team that cut its Yellow River sediment model from tens-of-metre grids to roughly one metre, producing months of channel projection in hours ⁶. All-domestic sourcing is the hedge; 超智融合 (supercomputing-intelligent computing convergence) is the bet that scientific and industrial workloads, not consumer chatbots, are where state compute should go.

On content, the state is industrialising generative AI through ownership rather than through new algorithm rules. At the CMG national short-drama conference in Pudong — attended by Shen Haixiong, deputy head of the Central Propaganda Department and CMG director — two flagship productions were announced as hybrids of live-action shooting and the Seedance large model, alongside an AI-assisted script evaluation and incubation system ⁷. Pudong's pitch is precisely its concentration of large models, compute and visual-generation capacity. No algorithm-recommendation update accompanies this.

Control still sits at the border. MOFCOM and MOST Announcement No. 48 of 2026 remains a proposal open for comment to Nov 15, covering 23 AI technologies among 40 across AI, biomedicine and solar — large models, agents and compute clusters included — with pre-export registration biting immediately and the open-source and academic-publication carve-out intact ⁸. Diplomacy continues on packages rather than institutions: in Tashkent on Oct 17 Li Qiang again placed AI alongside energy and modern agriculture as an area for development-strategy alignment with Uzbekistan ⁹.

Three tests carry forward and one has changed. The changed one: whether the Justice Ministry's promised AI law produces an actual State Council or CAC draft in 2026, and whether it takes the Zhejiang rights-and-contestability frame or the CAC security frame ¹. Unchanged: whether the 23 AI entries and the open-source exemption survive the Nov 15 deadline ⁸; whether the 意见's 19 tasks become named AI and compute targets with money attached ⁵; and whether the Zhengzhou node becomes the provincial replication template, which would make domestically sourced compute the truest measure of the promotion track ⁶.