Every brief.
The full run, most recent first.
- § 79 · FOREIGN-INVESTMENT-SECURITY-REVIEW
Why China Used Foreign Investment Security Review on Manus — Not Tech or Data Export
Hong Yanqing on Beijing's banning of Meta's Manus acquisition. The regulator's choice of pathway — Foreign Investment Security Review, not Technology or Data Export — signals a shift from 'transaction-level' to 'capability-level' oversight of frontier AI projects, with implications for any overseas tech investment touching China.
- § 80 · TOKENS
Cold Water on 'Token Trading' — Wang Qinglan on the NDA's High-Quality Data Set Initiative
In March 2026, the National Data Administration released the *Implementation Plan for Promoting High-Quality Industry Data Set Construction (Draft for Public Consultation)*, which explores a 'token (词元) based value system' and 'token trading as a new transaction mode' for high-quality data sets. The Chinese AI policy community immediately heralded the move as 'revolutionizing data trading.' Wang Qinglan pours cold water: token is a measuring unit, not a magic transformer. AI tokens are not crypto tokens. The bottleneck in China's data-element market isn't measurement — it's supply, rights clarity, compliance cost, and data silos.
- § 81 · CRIMINAL-LIABILITY
When PIPL Violation Becomes a Crime — Hong Yanqing on China's Personal Information Criminal Threshold
Hong Yanqing on the criminal-side analog to PIPL — when does mishandling personal information cross from administrative violation into the crime of 'infringing on citizens' personal information'? His critique: the two key elements ('relevant State provisions' and 'serious circumstances') are too loose, and courts have stretched them in ways that should worry compliance teams.
- § 82 · FACIAL-RECOGNITION
When Is Facial Recognition in a Public Place 'Necessary for Public Security'? Hong Yanqing's Four-Element Framework
Hong Yanqing on how to operationalize PIPL Article 26's 'necessary for public security' principle for public-place video surveillance and facial recognition. His framework: a four-step necessity test, tiered risk regime with a published prohibited list, three-fold technical controls, and a lifecycle closure mechanism — drawing on EU AI Act and US state-level practice.
- § 83 · AI-GOVERNANCE
Where China's Draft AI Anthropomorphic-Interaction Measures Need Work — A Scholar's Reform Map
Li Wenlong (科技利维坦) walks through the directions in which he would amend China's draft Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interaction Services (人工智能拟人化互动服务管理办法) — the country's first dedicated rule on 'companion'-style AI. His critique is structural, not cosmetic: the core definition of '拟人化 (anthropomorphisation)' is too broad because it anchors on human-like expression rather than the real harm (relational dependency); the invented concept of '交互数据 (interaction data)' should be deleted and folded back into PIPL rather than blanket-prohibited; Chapter 2 mixes three incompatible duty types and should be split; the '1M registered / 100k MAU' security-assessment trigger is borrowed from other regimes and does not track real risk; and the training-data duties are horizontal obligations misplaced in a vertical rule. For overseas counsel building companion-AI or emotional-AI products for the China market: this is a map of where the draft is likely to move, and which duties fall on deployers versus base-model providers.
- § 84 · AI-GOVERNANCE
AI Agents and the Limits of Consent — When 'Authorisation' Stops Being One Click
Li Wenlong (科技利维坦) takes the Doubao phone assistant — an AI that 'reads your screen' and acts across apps — and asks whether the consent/authorisation mechanism that traditional data law leans on can survive the agent era. His four challenges: the app-bounded 'private' environment dissolves as data and permissions move across apps (with Nissenbaum's Contextual Integrity as the only real conceptual anchor, and far from operational); agents that *act* (not just retrieve) push informed consent past the point of failure already reached by personalised ads; purpose limitation collapses because an agent chooses its own path, means and decisions from a low-information instruction, edging into automated decision-making; and ultra vires agency shifts liability from user to platform, with China's 'hallucination case' and the Air Canada case as the only thin precedents. For overseas counsel building or advising on agentic AI in China: a map of why 'authorisation' is becoming a problem of agency, system control, liability allocation and autonomy — not a checkbox — and why transparency is now a prerequisite, not a feature.