{
  "schema_version": 1,
  "slug": "ai-policy",
  "name": "AI & Algorithm Governance",
  "description": "China's policy on artificial intelligence, large models, generative AI, computing power, and algorithm regulation — industrial promotion, governance rules, and global AI diplomacy.",
  "version": 181,
  "updated_at": "2026-09-17T06:19:41.217258+00:00",
  "headline": "China keeps AI build-out and diplomacy advancing while model rules stay quiet",
  "brief_md": "The standing judgment holds and this batch does not move it: China's AI policy remains promotion-first. No new algorithm filing rule, large-model security review or content directive appears in these documents. The only item not already in the record is a US Federal Register notice partially repealing carbon pollution standards for fossil-fuel power plants [doc:23346] — it says nothing about China's AI stack, and its only use here is as background to a divergence in how the two systems treat power for compute: Beijing couples compute to green power by design, while this filing loosens emissions rules on the generation side. Nothing in the batch changes the promotion-versus-control balance.\n\nThe 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 agenda item and called it \"the foundational support for AI development.\" Its orders are industrial and energy policy, not censorship: reasonable layout and orderly, regulated build-out; a multi-tier networked compute system; key technology and equipment R&D; 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 construction; alignment of compute and power facility planning; and accelerated green-power direct connection and source-grid-load-storage projects. Market mechanisms are to do the matching work for supply and demand [doc:23161]. This is grid-and-cluster planning wearing an AI label.\n\nProvincial 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 the national compute network, the new-generation communications network and the power grid together [doc:21581]. Heilongjiang, another of the 17 approved regional nodes, 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% [doc:23160][doc:22691]. Neither provincial write-up mentions regulatory compliance as a bottleneck.\n\nThe newest institutional layer is data annotation, and it 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 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), 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 [doc:23208].\n\nInternationally, 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 [doc:23145]. The APEC energy ministers' meeting in Beijing put \"AI and energy mutual empowerment\" among three priority directions under China's chairmanship [doc:23130], and 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 [doc:22642]. The Sept 15 MFA readout adds the services-trade channel — CIFTIS drew 1,830 offline and 5,300 online exhibitors and 1,200 outcomes across digital-medical, smart-education and related fields [doc:23210].\n\nDiffusion 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; Unisound's \"token export\" served Ethiopian cross-border e-commerce with over 10 billion tokens in week one [doc:22508]. Tokens are becoming ordinary retail: Jingu Yuan, a dumpling restaurant outside Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications' south gate whose owner is a 2010 BUPT telecoms graduate, put a 10-yuan compute card on every table in July, after launching \"Jingu Yuan Dumpling Restaurant · SKILL\" in April — billed as the first restaurant to open its queue-numbering interface to customers' personal AI agents; its 2025 winter-solstice online queue passed 15,000 tables [doc:22243]. Skills are wired in through Macao's Huawei-backed HCIA-AI training and a roughly 500-person AI-and-brain-science symposium, and Liaoning's vocational competition added AI, low-altitude economy and industrial-internet tracks across 88 events with 2,100-plus contestants [doc:21992][doc:21765][doc:23157].\n\nThe 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.",
  "what_changed": "No material shift. This batch largely re-confirms the prior picture with documents already in the record; the only item not previously covered is a US Federal Register notice on power-plant carbon standards [doc:23346], which does not bear on China's AI policy. The one added detail is the Jingu Yuan dumpling-shop compute giveaway outside BUPT, including the 10-yuan token cards and the restaurant's agent-facing queue interface [doc:22243].",
  "material_change": false,
  "open_questions": [
    "Does the State Council's compute-network instruction harden into a named plan, budget line or dedicated agency?",
    "Does the BRICS AI open-source zone get a launch date and budget now that China holds the 2027 chairmanship?",
    "Does the National Data Administration's data-annotation pilot model spread nationally as a named program with its own funding line?",
    "Will a new domestic algorithm or large-model rule appear, shifting the promotion-versus-control balance?",
    "Does the US power-plant carbon-standards repeal translate into explicit policy easing data-centre power constraints in the US?"
  ],
  "sources": [
    {
      "id": "23346",
      "title": "Partial Repeal of the Carbon Pollution Standards for Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units",
      "publisher": "US Federal Register",
      "published_at": "2026-09-17",
      "url": "https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/09/17/2026-19071/partial-repeal-of-the-carbon-pollution-standards-for-fossil-fuel-fired-electric-generating-units"
    },
    {
      "id": "23161",
      "title": "Li Qiang chairs State Council executive meeting, further deploys work on strengthening production safety",
      "publisher": "Guangdong Provincial Government",
      "published_at": null,
      "url": "https://www.gd.gov.cn/gdywdt/gdyw/content/post_4954911.html"
    },
    {
      "id": "21581",
      "title": "贵州获批建设国家算力互联互通区域节点",
      "publisher": "Guizhou Provincial Government",
      "published_at": "2026-09-03",
      "url": "https://www.guizhou.gov.cn/home/gzyw/202609/t20260903_90813774.html"
    },
    {
      "id": "23160",
      "title": "Heilongjiang's 100-Billion-Yuan Digital Economy Cluster Rides the Momentum",
      "publisher": "Heilongjiang Provincial Government",
      "published_at": null,
      "url": "https://www.hlj.gov.cn/hlj/c107856/202609/c00_31975316.shtml"
    },
    {
      "id": "22691",
      "title": "Our province selected as regional node for national computing power interconnection.",
      "publisher": "Heilongjiang Provincial Government",
      "published_at": null,
      "url": "https://www.hlj.gov.cn/hlj/c107856/202609/c00_31973311.shtml"
    },
    {
      "id": "23208",
      "title": "Our province wins another national pilot in data annotation",
      "publisher": "Liaoning Provincial Government",
      "published_at": null,
      "url": "https://www.ln.gov.cn/web/ywdt/jrln/wzxx2018/2026091507083465076/index.shtml"
    },
    {
      "id": "23145",
      "title": "Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Guo Jiakun Hosts Regular Press Conference on September 14, 2026",
      "publisher": "MFA (spokesperson)",
      "published_at": "2026-09-14",
      "url": "https://www.mfa.gov.cn/web/fyrbt_673021/jzhsl_673025/202609/t20260914_12021744.shtml"
    },
    {
      "id": "23130",
      "title": "16th APEC Energy Ministers' Meeting Held in Beijing",
      "publisher": "NEA",
      "published_at": "2026-09-13",
      "url": "https://www.nea.gov.cn/20260913/9dc0d216f91b44ca8073a8ffe47a438c/c.html"
    },
    {
      "id": "22642",
      "title": "Assistant Foreign Minister Liu Bin Attends Opening Ceremony of the Fourth AI Capacity Building Seminar (2026-09-07)",
      "publisher": "MFA (news)",
      "published_at": "2026-09-07",
      "url": "https://www.mfa.gov.cn/web/wjbxw_new/202609/t20260907_12017685.shtml"
    },
    {
      "id": "23210",
      "title": "September 15, 2026: Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Guo Jiakun Hosts Regular Press Conference",
      "publisher": "MFA (spokesperson)",
      "published_at": "2026-09-15",
      "url": "https://www.mfa.gov.cn/web/fyrbt_673021/jzhsl_673025/202609/t20260915_12022859.shtml"
    },
    {
      "id": "22508",
      "title": "Over 10 billion tokens generated in first week! Domestic AI models power overseas e-commerce, no need to build computing power abroad — the 'token export' era has arrived | Overview",
      "publisher": "Yicai",
      "published_at": "2026-09-05",
      "url": "https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiVEFVX3lxTFBPSm5NVm5DQlFjYVd5WVBVbFNHWGFTM05SSVFWS1cyMlZCM0N6Z2NndXlxT1UxSUhadDhWS2pTTFB6OHQ3Tmx5T0pSOE1nNy1oU0pXUQ?oc=5"
    },
    {
      "id": "22243",
      "title": "Dumplings and tokens: A shop near BUPT serves AI computing power as dessert",
      "publisher": "36Kr",
      "published_at": "2026-09-02",
      "url": "https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiTkFVX3lxTE5HSEVxNUI2YnRnbzJRUXB3a2tkUXRNZ1ZvR0RTcGJ0djNubi1ESjlGODRmSTdXcGZuRTJSN0lTcjFXSzJWRkUtUmowdlkwUQ?oc=5"
    },
    {
      "id": "21992",
      "title": "'Innovative Computing Power Training Pilot Program' launches to boost AI application capabilities of tech companies.",
      "publisher": "Macao SAR Government press",
      "published_at": "2026-09-04",
      "url": "https://www.gcs.gov.mo/detail/zh-hans/N26IDFHCUD"
    },
    {
      "id": "21765",
      "title": "University of Macau Hosts International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Brain Science",
      "publisher": "Macao SAR Government press",
      "published_at": "2026-09-03",
      "url": "https://www.gcs.gov.mo/detail/zh-hans/N26ICFPGIV"
    },
    {
      "id": "23157",
      "title": "Third Liaoning Provincial Vocational Skills Competition Opens in Anshan; Wang Xinwei Speaks and Declares It Open",
      "publisher": "Liaoning Provincial Government",
      "published_at": null,
      "url": "https://www.ln.gov.cn/web/ywdt/jrln/wzxx2018/2026091411201979950/index.shtml"
    }
  ],
  "url": "https://china-snapshot.com/analysis/dossiers/ai-policy/v181.html",
  "current_url": "https://china-snapshot.com/analysis/dossiers/ai-policy.html",
  "json_url": "https://china-snapshot.com/data/topics/ai-policy/v181.json",
  "markdown_url": "https://china-snapshot.com/data/topics/ai-policy/v181.md",
  "analysis_label": "AI-assisted interpretation; verify against the cited original sources.",
  "comparison": {
    "previous_version": 180,
    "current_version": 181,
    "previous_url": "https://china-snapshot.com/analysis/dossiers/ai-policy/v180.html",
    "unit": "distinct cited documents",
    "retained": [
      "21581",
      "21765",
      "21992",
      "22243",
      "22508",
      "22642",
      "22691",
      "23130",
      "23145",
      "23157",
      "23160",
      "23161",
      "23208",
      "23210"
    ],
    "added": [
      "23346"
    ],
    "removed": [],
    "note": "Newly cited means new to this reading, not newly published. No longer cited does not mean retracted. Citation changes do not establish a policy change."
  }
}