# China Snapshot

> Machine-readable China signals for people and agents outside China: bilingual trending topics, official ministry and regulator announcements, market and macro indicators, and a synthesized current snapshot. The public surface refreshes five times daily on Beijing time (06:00, 10:30, 14:00, 18:30 and 22:00).

Canonical base: https://china-snapshot.com. This document describes the public, unauthenticated discovery surface only. Standard feeds follow `{schema_version, as_of, source, items[]}` with each item `{title, value, url, extra{}}`; Chinese titles carry an English translation in `extra.translation`. Salience in the digest is measured cross-platform attention, not editorial opinion, and every item links back to a source.

Use the canonical domain rather than a legacy GitHub raw mirror. Public data may be available through legacy mirrors while the product evolves, but those mirrors are not the canonical interface and must not be used to infer future access rights.

Claim boundary: in `daily_digest.json`, `observed_signal`, `evidence[]`, `source_class`, and `confidence` are source-backed story metadata. `narrative` and `why_it_matters` are analysis or inference generated from the ranked evidence set. Cite the evidence URLs and timestamps for factual claims; present analytical fields as interpretation.

Crawler hints: `/agents.txt` is the concise operational entry point; this file is the fuller agent-facing guide. Do not guess, probe, or rely on endpoints that are not in the manifest.

## Start here

- [Endpoints manifest](https://china-snapshot.com/data/endpoints.json): self-describing catalog of the current public feeds, schema notes and stable links — fetch this first
- [Current snapshot (JSON)](https://china-snapshot.com/data/daily_digest.json): current headline, narrative, market snapshot, themes, entities and ranked stories by pillar
- [Current snapshot (Markdown)](https://china-snapshot.com/data/digest.md): the same current snapshot in clean Markdown
- [Current public brief](https://china-snapshot.com/brief.html): an indexable, source-first HTML edition of the current snapshot for people and crawlers
- [Health](https://china-snapshot.com/data/health.json): collector success counts and freshness — check before relying on a feed
- [Source reliability](https://china-snapshot.com/data/source_reliability.json): feed age, source limitations, excluded browser-needed channels and scrape-confidence notes
- [Static search index](https://china-snapshot.com/data/search_index.json): compact cross-surface index of current stories, live feed items and synthesis topics
- [Payload budget](https://china-snapshot.com/data/payload_budget.json): file sizes and boot-versus-lazy data budget

## Digest trust fields

Each `top_stories[]` item may include:

- `observed_signal`: concise source-backed statement of what appeared where
- `evidence[]`: compact evidence records with source, title, URL, rank and source class
- `analysis_basis`: evidence ids behind the analytical read and whether it was LLM or heuristic
- `source_class` / `source_class_label`: primary source, state media, domestic media, institutional press, social attention or mixed
- `confidence`: source-layer confidence score, not a truth score for an analytical interpretation
- `watcher_lenses`: neutral analytical lenses such as primary-document, legal-regulatory, industrial-policy, macro-market or discourse watch

## Key public feeds

- [Government and regulatory registry](https://china-snapshot.com/data/gov_registry.json): same-day primary-source releases, bilingual and pillar-tagged
- [Organisation directory](https://china-snapshot.com/data/org_directory.json): structured directory of monitored first-party institutions, their remit, official channel, pillar and institutional grouping
- [Elite press](https://china-snapshot.com/data/elite_press.json): party organs, Chinese financial and tech media, English-facing Chinese state media, Sixth Tone and Western institutional press on China, bilingual and pillar-tagged
- [Markets and macro catalog](https://china-snapshot.com/data/endpoints.json): indices, CNY FX, commodities, PBOC rates, NBS monthly data, trade and property — use the manifest for each feed URL
- [Trending topics catalog](https://china-snapshot.com/data/endpoints.json): Baidu, Weibo and WeChat hot lists with English translations

## Live Synthesis

- [Synthesis index](https://china-snapshot.com/data/synthesis/index.json): tracked topics, their current one-line state, version and document count
- [Per-topic snapshot](https://china-snapshot.com/data/synthesis/ai-policy.json): `/data/synthesis/<slug>.json` — a bilingual analytical snapshot built from the primary-source corpus, with current state, timeline and sources
- Immutable per-version permalinks use `/data/synthesis/<slug>/v<N>.json`; cite the versioned URL when a public version is available

## Access and stability

- The manifest is authoritative for the public surface. An endpoint's presence does not confer rights beyond its documented public response.
- Use ordinary HTTP caching and rate limiting. Preserve attribution and source links.
- Future authenticated research products will use separately documented interfaces and explicit credentials. Do not treat this file, `robots.txt`, CORS headers or a URL pattern as authorization.

## Optional

- [Snapshot viewer (human UI)](https://china-snapshot.com/): the public data rendered for people
- [Source repository](https://github.com/tristan-mcinnis/china-dashboard): current collectors, schema and pipeline source