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A belated happy Mid-Autumn Festival — 6 Oct. this year — to those celebrating. Traditionally, this is the time when families in China and many Asian communities come together to enjoy mooncakes, celebrate the harvest, and prepare for the slower rhythm of the coming winter.
But when it comes to China's data and artificial intelligence fields, there's no slowing down. Following China's AI Plus national initiative recently released by the State Council, several national ministries, including those in charge of energy and transportation, have rolled out major policies to accelerate AI integration across key sectors.
Just before the Golden Week holiday, the Ministry of Transport, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the National Development and Reform Commission and another four national authorities jointly issued new implementation opinions for bringing AI into the transportation sector. These opinions set an ambitious goal that by 2027, AI should be widely adopted across the transportation industry, and by 2030, China aims to lead the world in smart transportation.
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The plan includes advancing AI innovation and deployment across autonomous driving, smart shipping, railway operations, logistics and intelligent construction, operation and maintenance of transportation infrastructure. It also emphasizes stronger AI governance by developing new standards and guidelines to regulate algorithms, large language models, and important data, while improving systems for risk assessment, security evaluation and emergency response.
A similar vision has been laid out for the energy sector as well. The National Energy Administration and the NDRC have announced their own AI roadmap for energy industry, targeting global leadership by 2030. Their focus will be on improving the coordination between computing power and smart energy applications and AI will be strongly encouraged to be used in energy exploration, power generation, grid distribution and renewable energy forecasting.
Amid growing concerns for data breaches, China's National Information Security Standardization Technical Committee, TC260, issued new Guidelines for Secure Emergency Response to Generative AI Services 22 Sept. The guidelines classify generative AI security incidents into three main types in relation to content, data and network attacks and rate them across four severity levels of ordinary, relatively major, significant and particularly significant.
Each level comes with real-world examples to help organizations assess risk. Companies must report immediately to authorities if an incident is Level 3 or higher, involves a large-scale data leak, violates core social values, occurs more than five times in 24 hours, or affects over 10,000 users. The compliance bar has been raised for companies engaging in developing and providing AI products and services.
On the enforcement front, Chinese regulators remain active in making investigations and cracking down on noncompliance. Recent investigations targeted companies that used AI technologies without proper compliance — including those that failed to conduct personal data protection impact assessments before collecting biometric data for training, transferred China-collected data overseas without the required security review, and used deepfake technologies in illegal manners.
Further south, Hong Kong's Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data has been active, too, issuing new guidelines and conducting AI compliance reviews to promote responsible innovation aligned with both national and international standards.
At the Global Privacy Assembly held in Seoul 15-19 Sept., the PCPD joined privacy regulators worldwide to release a Joint Statement on Building Trustworthy Data Governance Frameworks for AI.
Meanwhile, Hong Kong's tech scene continues to shine globally. The Hong Kong Trade Development Council and the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation will co-host two pavilions at GITEX Global 2025, one of the world's leading tech shows in Dubai. Exhibitors from Hong Kong will showcase cutting-edge innovations in AI and robotics, internet of things, and green technology. Hong Kong will continue to play an important role as a "super connector," bridging China's tech ecosystem with the global market.
Barbara Li, CIPP/E, is a partner at Reed Smith.
This article originally appeared in the Asia-Pacific Dashboard Digest, a free weekly IAPP newsletter. Subscriptions to this and other IAPP newsletters can be found here.
