What China Snapshot tracks.
The public signal surface, named and sourced: five Beijing-time collection windows, first-party market and policy series, social attention, and an archive-based deviation watch that flags what actually moved.
Collection cadence
Five collection windows, one accumulated state.
A systemd timer on China Snapshot's collection host runs every feed below five times a day, at 06:00, 10:30, 14:00, 18:30 and 22:00 Beijing time. Each run writes fresh public JSON, then baselines.py compares the new state against the archive before the daily digest is compiled.
Numeric layers · markets
Prices, flows and yields, first-party.
Every numeric series below is read from the institution or exchange that publishes it, not re-scraped from a single aggregator, so one vendor outage cannot take down the whole macro layer.
| Series | What it captures | Cadence |
|---|---|---|
| Stock indices | SSE Composite, Shenzhen Component, ChiNext, STAR 50 | 5x daily |
| FX & CNY parity | USD/CNY, USD/CNH, EUR/CNY, JPY/CNY spot rates plus the 09:15 CNY central parity fix | 5x daily |
| Government yield curve | CN sovereign yields by key tenor, with derived curve slope and AAA credit spreads | 5x daily |
| Commodities | Copper, WTI crude, Brent crude, gold | 5x daily |
| Iron ore | SGX 62% Fe CFR China futures settlements by tenor | 5x daily |
| Stock Connect | Northbound/Southbound turnover, net flow, quota balance | 5x daily |
Numeric layers · policy & liquidity
Rates, aggregates and fixings.
| Series | What it captures | Cadence |
|---|---|---|
| Policy rates | 1Y/5Y Loan Prime Rate, Reserve Requirement Ratio | 5x daily |
| Money & credit aggregates | M2/M1/M0, total social financing, RMB loans and deposits | Monthly print |
| Interbank repo fixings | FR001, FR007, FR014 | 5x daily |
Numeric layers · real economy
Prints that move the official narrative.
| Series | What it captures | Cadence |
|---|---|---|
| NBS monthly indicators | CPI, PPI, official manufacturing PMI | Monthly print |
| Trade data | Exports, imports, trade balance | Monthly print |
| Property prices | 70-city home price index | Monthly print |
Social attention
What China is searching for, in English.
Trending topics from Baidu, Weibo and WeChat are pulled at every collection window and translated to English with DeepSeek, so public attention sits next to the official line and the market reaction it may be shaping or reacting to.
Official & press signal
Central ministries to provincial governments, in one layer.
China Snapshot monitors first-party channels across central ministries and regulators, all 31 provincial-level mainland governments, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, alongside elite press: party organs and official media, domestic financial media, tech/industry media, Western press covering China, English-facing Chinese state media, and an English-language society desk. Chinese text is translated with DeepSeek; English text passes through unchanged. The complete monitored-channel list is not published. Individual citations on each Snapshot prove the work rather than a directory that would hand over the collection map. The current aggregate coverage count is always live at /data/gov_registry_health.json.
- Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM)
- Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA)
- Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council
- National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC)
- People’s Bank of China (PBOC)
- China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC)
- Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC)
- National Bureau of Statistics (NBS)
The method
Signaling × reaction × attention.
Every collection window resolves three layers at once: what officials said, how markets moved, and what the public searched for. Numeric series carry 30- and 90-day winsorized baselines computed from China Snapshot's own archive. The Deviation Watch ranks what is actually abnormal against that history (a z-spike beyond two standard deviations, a 90-day range break, or a fresh print on a step series like the LPR or CPI) instead of ranking stories by raw traffic alone.
Today's digest and one worked signal are public. The complete daily briefing, full archive search, deviation history across the whole record, Dossiers, Regions and Institutions are China Snapshot Professional capabilities.
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