Effective 6 September 2026. Responsible editor: Tristan McInnis.
What we publish from
Every claim on this site links to the document, data point or post it came from. We publish from four kinds of source, and we label which kind each item is:
- First-party official releases.Central ministries and regulators, the People's Bank of China, the National Bureau of Statistics, provincial governments, and the governments of Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, read from their own publication pages.
- Exchange and market data. ChinaBond, CFETS, HKEX, SGX and the official statistical releases, read from the institution that publishes the number.
- Institutional press. Party organs, domestic financial and industry media, English-facing state outlets, and Western press with a China desk. Press is labelled as press.
- Platform attention. The Baidu, Weibo and WeChat trending boards. Attention is labelled as attention, never as news.
What we never publish
- Rumours, unsourced claims, or anonymous sourcing.
- A paraphrase of a document presented as the document. The link goes to the original.
- A number we could not fetch. When a series is unavailable we omit it and say why. We do not carry a fallback value or an estimate.
- A cause. Deviation notes say that a series moved unusually against its own history. They do not say why it moved or what it will do next.
- Advice. Nothing here is legal, financial, investment or other professional advice.
How the machine draft is produced and gated
Collectors fetch the sources five times a day on Beijing time. A deterministic rule ranks the stories: number of independent sources, the rank of the publishing institution, and whether an archive baseline moved. A language model then writes the reading of the day from those ranked stories under written rules: cite the item you rely on, do not restate the headline, do not speculate on causes.
Before publication the draft passes deterministic checks. Every sentence must cite a ranked item. Numbers must match the feed they came from. Template wording and repeated sentences are rejected. A draft that fails these checks is not published; the edition falls back to a fact-only version built from the ranked items and the market data. The rules are fixed in code and applied the same way on every run.
Human accountability
The editor, Tristan McInnis, sets the source list and the editorial rules, reviews published editions and corrects them, and answers for corrections. When a rule is changed the change is recorded. The desk is published by CHINA SNAPSHOT LIMITED, Hong Kong.
AI disclosure, in plain words
Two parts of this site are produced by a language model (DeepSeek, operated from the People's Republic of China). Translations of Chinese headlines and documents are machine translations; the original text stays attached so you can check them. The written reading of each edition, the “why it matters” lines, the dossier prose and the answers in Ask are drafted by the model from retrieved documents, then gated by the checks above. Rankings, baselines, forecast resolution and every number are computed by deterministic code, not by a model. Where a page carries model prose, the page says so.
Corrections
If you find an error, write to support@china-snapshot.com with the page address and what you believe is wrong. We check the claim against the cited source. If the source does not support the claim, we correct it or remove it. A correction is noted on the page it applies to, with the date, so a reader who saw the earlier version can see what changed. Archived editions are never silently rewritten; a correction to a frozen edition is added as a note. We reply on working days, normally within five.
Independence and advertising
Advertising served by Google AdSense appears on the free Snapshot page and on public daily editions and dossiers that clear a length floor (400 words for an edition, 350 for a dossier). Shorter public pages carry none. Every ad is labelled as an advertisement. Advertising has no influence on what we cover, how we rank it or what we write: the ranking is a fixed rule and the ad is placed after the content is finished. Advertisers cannot buy placement in the editorial content. Professional members never see advertising.
Questions about these standards go to contact@china-snapshot.com. See also the method page, the terms of use and the privacy notice.