AI & Algorithm Governance

China's AI policy is still promotion-first, and this batch of fourteen documents mostly re-confirms rather than changes that. Thirteen items were already in the record — compute-node approvals, data-annotation growth, token exports, capacity-building seminars. The one new document is a routine Foreign Ministry calendar entry: Vice President Han Zheng attends the UN General Assembly's general debate in New York Sept 24–26 and a Global Development Initiative anniversary dialogue, while the 48th WorldSkills Competition runs in Shanghai Sept 22–27 and the fifth Global Digital Trade Expo in Hangzhou Sept 23–27, with Malaysia's Anwar attending ¹. That is diplomacy logistics, not an AI rule. The instrument that still matters is the draft State Council regulation on minors' internet use, published for comment by the Cyberspace Administration of China on Sept 18 with an Oct 17 deadline ².

The industrial anchor remains compute-as-infrastructure. Guizhou is the only first-batch regional node whose implementation consortium includes a grid company — Guizhou Power Grid alongside the three provincial telecom branches — creating a 'three-network hub' that ties the national compute network, the new-generation communications network and the power grid together, and making compute-power coordination its declared comparative advantage ³. 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 at 25.4% average annual growth, with the share of firms digitising key processes rising from 34.6% to 51.8% ⁴. This is grid-and-cluster planning wearing an AI label; neither province names compliance as a bottleneck.

Data annotation is being staffed and counted like a manufacturing sector. The National Data Administration's second batch of national annotation pilot cities named Shenyang (industrial manufacturing) and Dalian (medical health), making Liaoning a 'two cities, two domains' 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 3,000-firm software cluster with 200,000-plus software workers, nine tertiary hospitals and over 53 million annual patient visits ⁵.

The control thread is moving on an unusual track. The minors' regulation is drafted under the Minors Protection Law, the Cybersecurity Law and the Personal Information Protection Law, and its scope runs past platforms to smart-terminal manufacturers and app-distribution services ². Two things follow. It is a State Council regulation, not a CAC departmental rule — heavier, and once finalised it binds hardware and app-store layers as well as content platforms. And it targets minors and terminals, not models or algorithms: nothing here touches generative-AI filing, model safety review or algorithm recommendation duties.

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'; China takes the BRICS chair next year and hosts the 19th summit ⁶. 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 ⁷. The services-trade channel adds volume: CIFTIS drew 1,830 offline and 5,300 online exhibitors and 1,200 outcomes ⁸, and Hangzhou's digital-trade expo is the next venue of the same kind ¹.

The only counter-signal comes from outside China. A US Federal Register notice partially repealing carbon pollution standards for fossil-fuel power plants says nothing about China's AI stack, but it sharpens the energy contrast under compute: Beijing is coupling compute build-out to green power and source-grid-load-storage projects by design while Washington loosens emissions rules on generation ⁹. That divergence matters for the cost and siting of training clusters over the next five years. Beneath the diplomacy, diffusion keeps widening — Unisound's 'token export' served Ethiopian cross-border e-commerce with over 10 billion tokens in week one off domestic compute ¹⁰, and Macao's Huawei-backed pilot put 28 staff from certified tech firms through Ascend-based training toward HCIA-AI Solution exams ¹¹.

The read is unchanged in direction. China is institutionalising AI's full stack — compute, power, data, skills — as planned infrastructure and turning multilateral platforms into delivery vehicles, while domestic rules on models and algorithms stay untouched; the one active control file is about minors, not models. Three things to watch: whether the minors' regulation finalises after Oct 17 and 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.