A compliance officer in Shanghai gets a routine request from headquarters: send an archive of annotated customer-service transcripts to a training cluster in Frankfurt. The instinct is to ask how much data it is, and how many people appear in it.
Both questions matter. Neither decides the case.
The decisive question is whether any Chinese authority has formally told the company that its data is important data (重要数据) — because if nobody has, the gate that most foreign firms plan for may not apply at all.
Key takeaways
- The three data-export procedures — security assessment, standard contract, certification — apply only to personal information and important data; other data crosses without them (CAC Order No. 16, 22 March 2024).
- Under Article 2, a processor not notified by any department or region, whose data has not been published as important, need not declare it as important data (CAC, 2024).
- Nine free-trade zones plus Hainan had published data-export negative lists covering 28 industry fields as of 22 October 2026, the Ministry of Commerce said.
- Shanghai's 2024 list covered finance, trade and shipping across six scenarios and 84 data items (State Council Information Office, 4 July 2025).
- Beijing's March 2026 reform, covering six priority fields, adds a sandbox for cross-border model training without moving raw data (Science and Technology Daily, 28 March 2026).
The word that decides the case
The governing text is the Cyberspace Administration of China's Order No. 16, the Provisions on Promoting and Regulating Cross-Border Data Flows (《促进和规范数据跨境流动规定》), which took effect on 22 March 2024. It governs personal information and important data, not data as a whole.
Article 2 is the part foreign counsel skip. Processors must identify and declare important data — but where no department or region has notified them, and no public designation has been issued, they need not treat the data as important for a security assessment.
That inverts the usual assumption. The gate is a designation, not a volume, and a company that has received none faces a documentary question rather than a technical one: can it show that no notice arrived? For an AI team, the first artefact is not a data-flow diagram but the correspondence record.
Two exemptions do real work here. Article 3 exempts data from international trade, cross-border transport, academic cooperation and multinational manufacturing or marketing, provided it contains no personal information and no important data. Article 4 exempts personal information collected abroad, sent into China for processing and then back out, if no domestic personal information or important data is introduced. That second clause is the closest thing to a channel for offshore model work.
Three doors and three thresholds
For personal information, transfers are sorted by calendar-year volume from 1 January.
- A non-critical-infrastructure operator sending under 100,000 people's personal information, excluding sensitive data, is exempt.
- Between 100,000 and one million people, or under 10,000 sensitive records, a standard contract or a certification is required.
- One million or more people, 10,000 or more sensitive records, any important data, or any transfer by a critical-information-infrastructure operator, requires a security assessment.
An assessment lasts three years and can be extended by three more, on application 60 working days before expiry (CAC, 2024). The counter resets each January, so a small December batch inherits the year's total — the commonest way a routine transfer becomes a filing.
The lists that shrink the perimeter
Article 6 delegates. A free-trade zone may draft its own negative list of data that stays inside the three procedures; the provincial cybersecurity committee approves it, and it is filed with the CAC and the National Data Administration. Data outside the list is exempt from all three.
That delegation has become the main channel. Nine free-trade zones plus Hainan had published lists covering 28 industry fields by 22 October 2026, according to the Ministry of Commerce. Shanghai's 2024 version covered finance, trade and shipping in six scenarios and 84 data items. Zones need not duplicate each other: where one has listed a field, others may adopt its list, the CAC said in an April 2025 policy Q&A. Hunan opened a consultation on its first list on 20 October 2026.
Beijing has gone further. Its third-round reform package, published on 27 March 2026, covers six priority fields including AI and connected vehicles, with a cross-border trusted data space and a sandbox built on privacy computing, so data is usable but not visible (数据可用不可见) and models train across the border without raw records moving (Science and Technology Daily, 28 March 2026).
The perimeter is drawn by sector, not by technology. A company whose sector is absent from every list falls back on the national thresholds.
What this leaves open for AI
Three gaps remain.
Order No. 16 never mentions model weights. Its scope is personal information and important data; weights are neither. Silence is not permission — it means the question is answered elsewhere, or not yet.
A second regime exists: the draft export-control catalogue notified on 16 October 2026 treats models trained on core or important data as a separate question, so clearing the data rules does not clear the technology rules (Ministry of Commerce, 2026).
And localisation still binds critical-infrastructure operators; the negative lists do not reach that obligation.
Honest limitations
Counts of covered fields differ between official sources: a Hunan commerce-department notice on 20 October 2026 counted 22 fields, while the Ministry of Commerce said 28 two days later. This article uses the ministry figure and dates it. The negative lists are provincial documents in Chinese, revised without ceremony; we read summaries, not every annex. No enforcement statistics are published, so we cannot say how often a transfer is challenged. Article 2's reliance on notification has not been tested publicly in litigation, and silence on weights is not a safe harbour.
What readers can do now
- Ask the counterparty for the negative list covering its province and sector, with the version date, and check whether your data type appears on it.
- Obtain and file a written record of whether any regulator has designated the dataset as important data; that record, not a flow diagram, is what an assessment turns on.
- Count cumulative personal information from 1 January before choosing a standard contract or a full assessment, and treat any December shipment as inheriting the year's total.