AI & Algorithm Governance

China's AI policy remains promotion-first, and this batch changes nothing about the balance: the build-out layer keeps extending while the control layer — algorithm, model and content rules — stays quiet. What the documents confirm is how far the planning logic has reached: from the cabinet's compute-network instruction, down through provincial grid-and-cluster builds, to the data-labelling workshops that feed models. No new domestic restriction, security review or model rule appears. That asymmetry — heavy on infrastructure and diplomacy, light on regulation — is the standing judgment, and it holds.

The anchor is still the Sept 11 State Council executive meeting chaired by Li Qiang, which made the computing-power network (算力网) a standalone item and called it "the foundational support for AI development." Its orders are siting, power and scheduling policy, not censorship: reasonable layout and orderly build-out, a multi-tier networked compute system, the pairing of compute-power coordination and compute-network integration (算电协同、算网融合), compute-resource monitoring and dispatch, backbone optical-fibre, and accelerated green-power direct connection and source-grid-load-storage projects ¹. This is industrial planning dressed as energy policy.

Provincial evidence shows the template running. Guizhou is the only first-batch regional node whose consortium includes a grid company (Guizhou Power Grid, alongside the three telecom branches), producing a "three-network hub" tying together the national compute network, the new-generation communications network and the power grid ². Heilongjiang, another first-batch node, anchors on China Mobile's Harbin 10,000-card cluster and reports 430 provincial digital workshops and smart factories by end-2025 — up 212 since 2022, a 25.4% annual rise — with the share of enterprises digitising key business processes climbing from 34.6% to 51.8% ^3,4.

The newest institutional piece is data annotation. The National Data Administration's second batch of national data-annotation innovation pioneer cities named Shenyang (industrial manufacturing) and Dalian (medical health), making Liaoning a "two cities, two domains" pilot province. Liaoning's 2026–2028 action plan reports 27,000 TB of annotated data, 334 high-quality datasets, more than 120 firms, over 20,000 workers and a 6.2-billion-yuan industry; Dalian's data-annotation park has drawn 19 firms including 金慧科技 (Jinhui Technology), 医通康合 (Yitong Kanghe) and 东软云科技 (Neusoft Cloud) ⁵. Labelling is being staffed and counted like a manufacturing sector.

Internationally, Beijing keeps converting chairmanships into named deliverables. At the BRICS summit in New Delhi (Sept 12–13), Xi announced China will lead construction of a BRICS AI open-source zone, a digital-industry cloud platform and a youth sci-tech exchange plan aimed at helping Global South countries "benefit equally" — and the MFA confirmed China takes the BRICS chair next year, hosting the 19th summit ⁶. The APEC energy ministers' meeting in Beijing put "AI and energy mutual empowerment" among three priority directions under China's chairmanship ⁷, and Assistant Foreign Minister Liu Bin opened the fourth AI capacity-building seminar for more than 30 countries at Peking University ⁸. The Sept 15 MFA readout adds the services-trade channel — the Beijing CIFTIS drew 1,830 offline and 5,300 online exhibitors and 1,200 outcomes across digital-medical, smart-education and related fields ⁹. That is the counter-narrative to Washington's "small circle" supply-chain push.

Diffusion keeps widening beneath the diplomacy. MIIT's software plan still targets high-standard coding tools reaching more than 20,000 major enterprises and 100 benchmark agent-based applications by 2028; tokens are becoming ordinary — Unisound's "token export" served Ethiopian cross-border e-commerce with over 10 billion tokens in week one, while a dumpling shop near Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications hands out 10-yuan compute cards ^10,11. Skills are wired in through Macao's Huawei-backed HCIA-AI training, a roughly 500-person AI-and-brain-science symposium, and Liaoning's vocational competition adding AI, low-altitude economy and industrial-internet tracks across 88 events with 2,100-plus contestants ^12,13,14.

The read for outside observers is unchanged: China is institutionalising AI's full stack — compute, power, data and skills — as planned infrastructure and turning multilateral platforms into delivery vehicles, while leaving domestic model rules untouched. Three things to watch: whether the State Council's compute-network instruction hardens into a named plan, budget line or agency; whether the BRICS AI open-source zone gets a launch date now that China holds the chair; and whether the data-annotation pilot model spreads nationally as a named program.