These terms cover the public site, free briefing, member accounts, research workspace, API/MCP access, and any Professional subscription. Billing remains closed to the public until the production purchase flow has passed its launch checks. A checkout will show the seller, price, billing interval, renewal, and cancellation terms before you pay.
Who you are dealing with
China Snapshot is operated by CHINA SNAPSHOT LIMITED, incorporated in Hong Kong, Business Registration No. 80961828, with registered office at Unit 2904-05, 29/F, Universal Trade Centre, 3 Arbuthnot Road, Hong Kong S.A.R. These terms are governed by Hong Kong law and the Hong Kong courts have non-exclusive jurisdiction. Mandatory consumer rights and any forum rights that cannot lawfully be excluded remain unaffected. Contact: contact@china-snapshot.com.
Informational service, not advice
China Snapshot provides source-linked informational and analytical material about China. It is not legal, financial, investment, tax, accounting, compliance, or other professional advice, it is not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold anything, and no fiduciary or advisory relationship is created by using it. Information may be delayed, incomplete, mistranslated, or incorrect. Verify important decisions against original sources and qualified advisers.
Two specifics matter for how this material is produced. Headlines and documents from Chinese sources are machine-translated, and briefing interpretation, including “why it matters” lines and Ask answers, is generated by a language model against retrieved documents; where a generated line cannot be supported by the underlying evidence it may be replaced with conservative standard wording. Deviation notes such as a move expressed in standard deviations are statistical observations against our own archive baseline. They describe what is unusual, not what caused it and not what will happen next.
How that material is produced, reviewed and corrected is set out in the editorial standards.
AI features and what you submit
Archive search and Ask send your text to third-party AI providers, including one operated from the People’s Republic of China, and Ask answers are generated by that provider’s model. Read the privacy notice before using them. Do not submit client names, confidential deal information, personal data about other people, or anything you are not permitted to disclose to a third-party processor. Generated answers cite the documents they were drawn from; check those documents before relying on any claim.
Permitted use
You may access the public site and use reasonable excerpts from the free briefing with attribution and a link. Member research material is limited to the access granted by your account and plan. You may not share credentials, disrupt the service, bypass access controls, misrepresent content or provenance, probe for credentials, or use the service unlawfully.
Use of API and MCP output
If your plan includes API or MCP access, you may use the responses in your own internal work, research notes, and client deliverables, including caching them in your own systems and passing them to your own agents. That permission is non-exclusive, non-sublicensable, and revocable if these terms are breached, and it carries three conditions.
- Keep the source URL and the timestamp attached to any evidence record you quote or store, so a reader of your work can reach the original document.
- Do not redistribute responses as a competing feed, a bulk dataset, or a public mirror, and do not resell access.
- Do not use responses as training data for a machine-learning model.
Third-party source material inside a response stays subject to its owner’s rights, which the licence above cannot extend. Quotas are per plan; exceeding one returns an error rather than an overage charge.
Sources and intellectual property
Third-party headlines, documents, data, and marks remain the property of their respective owners. The selection, organization, translations, synthesis, software, and presentation are protected to the extent allowed by law and are owned by or licensed to CHINA SNAPSHOT LIMITED. Any open-source licence attached to the public code repository grants rights in that source code only; it does not grant rights in third-party source material, in member-only research pages, or in the archive. Source links are provided so users can inspect the underlying record.
Accounts and paid access
Account features are open, while Professional checkout may be invite-only or unavailable until billing readiness checks are complete. A paid contract forms only when you complete a checkout that states the seller, price, billing interval, taxes, renewal, and cancellation terms. Subscriptions renew automatically for the interval shown at checkout until cancelled. Cancellation stops future renewal and normally leaves access in place through the paid period. Mandatory refund and cooling-off rights in your jurisdiction remain unaffected.
You must provide accurate account information, keep credentials confidential, and notify us promptly of suspected misuse. You must be at least 18, or the age at which you may enter this agreement where you live. We may suspend access where reasonably necessary to protect the service, investigate abuse, comply with law, or address a material breach; where practical, we will explain the reason and give you an opportunity to remedy it.
Availability and changes
The service is provided “as is” and “as available.” Features, sources, schedules, and free limits may change. Stable public archive permalinks are intended to remain citable, but no uninterrupted availability is promised.
Liability
To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, the operator of China Snapshot is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or reliance losses arising from use of the public service, including losses from acting on delayed, mistranslated, or machine-generated material. Rights that cannot lawfully be excluded, including consumer rights that apply where you live, remain unaffected.
Privacy
The privacy notice explains what is collected, which sub-processors receive it, how long it is kept, and how to make an access or deletion request. It forms part of these terms.
Contact and changes
Questions can be sent to contact@china-snapshot.com; privacy requests to privacy@china-snapshot.com. Material changes will be posted with a new effective date. Changes do not retroactively alter a purchase already made except where the law or a change needed to keep the service secure requires it.