The best sources for tracking Chinese tech policy in 2026

Every organisation that touches Chinese technology eventually assembles its own media diet, and most start the same way: a Reuters alert, a newsletter forwarded by a colleague, and a growing suspicion that the real decisions are visible in documents nobody in the room has read. The practitioners who track Chinese tech policy best tend to converge on the same three layers — primary documents, interpretation, and legal text — and the strongest source in each is stable enough to recommend.

Layer one: the primary documents themselves

The regulations that matter are published by a small set of bodies: the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM). Their publications are authoritative, free, and in Chinese — which is precisely why most teams never read them directly.

Two things follow from that. First, any summary you consume is downstream of a translation choice, and machine- or human-translated policy text always carries interpretive weight; China Law Translate exists partly to keep that problem honest for legal texts. Second, the documents are legible to machines, which is the premise behind the Caybles policy tracker: it scrapes the four ministries' publication feeds every thirty minutes, classifies entries across eight policy areas — AI, semiconductors, data and cybersecurity, robotics, trade and export controls, platforms, telecom and compute — and machine-translates them into English while keeping the Chinese original retrievable. Where a policy lands on markets, the tracker overlays the dates on index data (HSTECH, CSI 300, SSE STAR 50, KWEB, USD/CNY).

The same feed is also queryable directly by AI agents through the tracker's MCP server, which matters because the fastest-growing consumer of Chinese policy documents is no longer a person with a browser but an agent assembling a brief.

Layer two: research institutes and analysts

• MERICS (Berlin) — Europe's largest China-studies institute, and the natural first stop for the European policy angle; its China Tech Observatory pairs qualitative analysis with data on funding and research output.
• CSIS (Washington) — the reference point for the American strategic view, particularly on semiconductors and technology security.
• Trivium China — a policy research firm built on reading Chinese government documents quickly and well; its podcast is a practical habit for following regulatory currents in something close to real time.
• Concordia AI — the specialist watch on Chinese AI-safety governance, including the ethics-review pilot and safety-framework developments now reshaping that field.

Layer three: newsletters that translate the conversation

The documents are half the story; the other half is the debate inside China's own policy community, and a handful of newsletters have made it their job to surface it.

• Sinocism (Bill Bishop) — the long-running staple of China watching, with its Sinification project translating and analysing key internal debates.
• Pekingnology (Zichen Wang) — translations of speeches, essays and statements that rarely travel beyond Chinese-language circuits.
• ChinaTalk (Jordan Schneider) — interviews and essays at the intersection of technology, policy and strategy.
• What's on Weibo (Manya Koetse) — the indicator of how policy and events actually land in Chinese public conversation.
• The Wire China (David Barboza) — reported investigations and document-driven features.

Layer four: legal text you can cite

When an obligation needs to be quoted rather than described, three resources carry the operative language: China Law Translate for bilingual statute and regulation; artificialintelligenceregulations.com for a maintained, source-based overview of binding versus non-binding AI requirements; and China Briefing (Dezan Shira) for practical compliance-oriented summaries aimed at foreign operators. For the European counterparty of the story, the EU AI Act comparison maps how the two regimes interlock.

How practitioners combine them

The method that survives contact with deadlines is unglamorous: start from the primary document, read at least two interpreters from different camps — a research institute and a newsletter, say — and treat the Chinese original as authoritative wherever translation is in doubt. That is also the guidance the Caybles MCP server hands to every agent that connects: cross-check voices, weigh the official text over any interpretation of it. The voices feed tracks many of the newsletters above precisely so this cross-checking takes minutes rather than a morning.

A disclosure in keeping with the method: we build Caybles, so weight that recommendation accordingly, and use the links to the other sources in this list as the check on our work.

Frequently asked questions

What is the single best free source for Chinese AI regulation?

The ministry feeds themselves — everything else is commentary on them. Tools exist precisely because reading CAC and MIIT publications directly is time-consuming, not because they are inaccessible.

Do I need to read Chinese to track Chinese tech policy?

Increasingly, no — machine translation has made the primary layer navigable, with the caveat that translation quality matters and originals should stay retrievable. Legal drafting still rewards a bilingual check via a project like China Law Translate.

How do analysts avoid being wrong about Chinese policy signals?

By triangulation: no single commentator carries the full picture, which is why the working method is two interpreters from different camps per document, plus the document itself.

A note on dates and drift

Sources in this list were accurate at publication; Chinese policy media changes fast, and paywalls shift. Where a source has gone quiet, the tracker's voices roster tends to reflect the current state of the ecosystem first, because it is refreshed continuously rather than annually.