AI & Algorithm Governance

China's AI policy as of mid-September 2026 remains promotion-first with domestic control held steady, while the international layer hardens into a narrative-and-standards contest. The sharpest new beat is on the rhetorical front: the Foreign Ministry spent Sept 9-10 rebutting US claims, including the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's public accusation that DeepSeek and Moonshot stole American large-model technology, which Mao Ning answered by insisting China's AI is the product of high-level self-reliance and calling for cooperation rather than smears ¹. That matters because it targets China's flagship model firms directly, not just trade flows.

The domestic promotion engine runs on two tracks. MIIT Vice Minister Xie Yuansheng, at the 2026 Global Industrial Internet Conference in Shenyang (Sept 9), said the ministry will deepen its industrial-internet innovation project on a "unified layout, digital-intelligence empowerment, scenario-driven, open-source and open" basis to build a digital base for "AI+manufacturing" ². In parallel, SASAC Deputy Director Pang Xiaogang told the Fourth China Forum on High-Quality Industrial Development (Sept 8, Shenyang) that the commission will draft central enterprises' 15th Five-Year Plan to drive deep industrial upgrading and position SOEs in emerging industries ³. Ministry program design and central-SOE capital point at the same target.

Liaoning is the showcase, now also a node host. Governor Wang Xinwei frames the province around "intelligent transformation, digital transition, AI invigorating industry" (智改数转AI兴工) and the "six networks" buildout, citing 18 national excellence-level smart factories and 1,312 basic and advanced smart factories ⁴. Layered on that is its approval as a first-batch national computing-power interconnection regional node ⁴. The compute geography widened too: Guizhou was named among the first 17 regional nodes and is the only province whose consortium includes a grid company, creating a "three-network hub" linking the national compute network, the communications network and the power grid ⁵, while Heilongjiang won a node anchored by China Mobile's Harbin 10,000-card intelligent-computing cluster and ranks first in compute scale in the Northeast ⁶. This is promotion expressed as nodes and factory counts, not rules.

Control stays quiet. The only governance-flavoured instrument in the batch is the 15th Five-Year Plan for IP Protection and Utilization (2026-2030), which refines IP rules for algorithms, AI-generated content and platform-economy IP — ownership and market conduct, not speech or security review ⁷. Beijing's security reflex is to reframe AI risk as misuse: asked about a US firm's claim that its AI hacker tool could hijack WeChat accounts, Mao Ning said only that AI should be guided "toward good" and abuse prevented ¹.

Internationally the cooperative face continues. The fourth AI Capacity Building Seminar opened at Peking University with delegates from 30-plus countries; Assistant Foreign Minister Liu Bin argued capacity building must give developing countries autonomous capability plus governance skills, not one-way grants ⁸. Chinese firms keep pitching "token export": Unisound says it serves Ethiopian cross-border e-commerce on domestic U2-model compute, generating over 10 billion tokens in its first week ⁹. Global Times frames China as advancing global AI governance "on all fronts," turning WAIC 2026 principles into concrete action ¹⁰.

The friction is now about who writes the rules. The US Embassy in Panama is piloting a global AI supply-chain certification and traceability platform covering semiconductors, critical minerals and AI-infrastructure goods; Guo Jiakun called closed, exclusionary "small circles" harmful to the Global South and offered to build a fair AI governance system with Latin America and the Caribbean ¹¹. Standards, certification and attribution claims are the new battleground, alongside Mao Ning's pushback on the "ladder-pulling" narrative, in which she cast China as building ladders for the South rather than removing them ¹.

The read for outside observers: China is buying capacity and goodwill and reaching for IP law and standards — not content bans — wherever governance pressure appears. Three pivots to watch: whether the algorithm/AIGC IP plan becomes enforceable ⁷; whether the Panama certification contest hardens into bloc-wide standards ¹¹; and whether SASAC's central-enterprise 15th FYP converts SOE capital into the AI+manufacturing buildout ³. Compute-node expansion and factory targets keep demand for chips, power and industrial data climbing. One new domestic signal: Liaoning party chief Xu Kunlin paired AI with education on a Sept 9 campus visit, ordering deeper "AI empowering education" ¹² — the talent pipeline is being folded into the same push.