AI & Algorithm Governance

China's AI policy remains promotion-first. Of the fourteen documents in this batch, thirteen repeat ground already in the record — compute-node approvals, data-annotation growth, token exports, capacity-building seminars. The one genuinely new item is a governance document: on Sept 18 the Cyberspace Administration of China published a draft State Council regulation on ensuring minors' healthy and safe use of the internet, with comments due Oct 17 ¹. It is drafted under the Minors Protection Law, the Cybersecurity Law and the Personal Information Protection Law, and its scope runs beyond platforms to smart-terminal manufacturers and app-distribution services. The promotion-versus-control balance is unchanged; what is new is that a control instrument is moving through the State Council legislative track rather than a CAC departmental rule — and it is aimed at minors and terminals, not at models or algorithms.

The industrial anchor is still compute-as-infrastructure. MIIT's Aug 28 notice naming 17 national compute-interconnection regional nodes is now visible in provincial execution: Guizhou is the only first-batch node whose consortium includes a grid company (Guizhou Power Grid, alongside the three telecom branches), producing a 'three-network hub' that ties the national compute network, the new-generation communications network and the power grid together ². Heilongjiang, another approved 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. This is grid-and-cluster planning wearing an AI label, and neither provincial account names regulatory compliance as a bottleneck.

Data annotation is being staffed and counted like a manufacturing sector. 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 annotation park has drawn 19 firms including Jinhui Technology, Yitong Kanghe and Neusoft Cloud, sitting on a software cluster of 3,000-plus firms and 200,000-plus software workers, plus nine tertiary hospitals and over 53 million annual patient visits ⁵.

The only counter-signal in the batch comes from outside China. A US Federal Register notice partially repealing carbon pollution standards for fossil-fuel power plants ⁶ says nothing about China's AI stack, but it sharpens the contrast on the energy side of compute: Beijing is coupling compute build-out to green power and source-grid-load-storage projects by design, while Washington is loosening emissions rules on generation. That divergence matters for cost and siting of training clusters over the next five years, and it is the one place where this batch touches the compute-power question at all.

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 ⁷. Assistant Foreign Minister Liu Bin opened the fourth AI capacity-building seminar for more than 30 countries at Peking University, framing capability-building as governance-building too ⁸. The services-trade channel adds volume: CIFTIS drew 1,830 offline and 5,300 online exhibitors and 1,200 outcomes across digital-medical, smart-education and related fields ⁹.

Diffusion keeps widening beneath the diplomacy, and it is now ordinary retail and ordinary certification. Unisound's 'token export' served Ethiopian cross-border e-commerce with over 10 billion tokens in week one, run off domestic compute ¹⁰. Macao's Huawei-backed 'Innovative Computing Power Training Pilot Program' put 28 staff from certified tech firms through five days of Ascend-based training toward HCIA-AI Solution exams ¹¹, while the University of Macau's AI and brain-science symposium drew about 500 participants ¹². Liaoning's vocational competition added AI, low-altitude economy and industrial-internet tracks across 88 events with 2,100-plus contestants ¹³. A dumpling restaurant outside Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications put a 10-yuan compute card on every table ¹⁴.

The read for outside observers is unchanged in direction but slightly updated in instrument. China is institutionalising AI's full stack — compute, power, data and skills — as planned infrastructure and turning multilateral platforms into delivery vehicles, while domestic model rules stay untouched. Three things to watch: whether the minors' internet regulation finalises after Oct 17 and whether it assigns recommendation or content duties to platforms, terminals and app stores; whether the compute-node instruction hardens into a named plan, budget line or agency; and whether the BRICS AI open-source zone gets a launch date now that China holds the chair.