On July 30, 2026, SAC/TC609, China's national technical committee on data standardization, held its first plenary meeting of 2026 in Beijing. Liu Liehong, Administrator of the National Data Administration (NDA) and chairman of TC609, attended and spoke at the meeting, which was chaired by Xia Bing, Vice Administrator of and vice chairman of TC609. Officials from the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), and relevant NDA departments also attended.

The meeting reviewed three institutional documents, including the revised Working Group Charter, 29 national standard projects pending approval, 79 newly proposed standard projects, and 12 technical documents to be released.

The meeting noted that TC609 has made steady progress on its annual targets, and its practice of developing standards with broad external input has been well received by stakeholders.

For the rest of the year, the meeting sets out three priorities:

• Improve the top-level design of the data standards system and guard against low-quality, duplicated standard drafting.

• Boost the supply of high-quality data standards to serve AI development. A second batch of standard demand lists will be released soon, and the second "Standards Week" event is being prepared.

• Step up communication of new standards to encourage their adoption in practice.

These standardization efforts build on a policy framework developed over recent years to treat data as a production factor that, like land and capital, can be priced, traded, and used to generate value. The starting point is the "Data Twenty Measures" issued by the central government in late 2022. Because data can be copied endlessly, traditional property law does not fit: the same dataset may be held by one party, used by another, and traded by a third. The Twenty Measures therefore split data rights into three layers – holding, processing and use, and product operation – and set directions for circulation, revenue distribution, and security. The NDA has since issued supporting documents on each area. Work is also underway to classify public data by sensitivity so that more of it can be opened or commercially used, and to clarify how companies register, value, and record data on their balance sheets, with localities running pilots first.

The framework, however, is not yet matched by market practice. Many government bodies and companies hold valuable data but keep it idle – partly out of risk aversion, since releasing data without clear rules can mean security and liability exposure, and partly because turning raw records into usable, de-identified datasets takes skills they lack. Buyers, for their part, struggle to find data, judge its quality, or agree on a price, as professional intermediaries such as data brokers and compliance auditors are only emerging. Most companies therefore still cannot book data as an asset, and few professionals understand both data governance and a specific industry.

The next phase of reform targets these bottlenecks. Detailed rules under the Twenty Measures will turn the principles into operable requirements. More regions are expected to license selected operators to develop and monetize public data under set conditions, with paid use tied to specific scenarios. Pilots will test whether data can be formally recognized in corporate accounts, the three-year "Data Element X" plan will scale up data use in key industries, and governments are building shared facilities for data processing, supply-demand matching, and compliance checks, so that companies need not build all this themselves.

For companies doing business in China's digital economy, TC609 standards and domestic pilots will directly affect real-life practice of data compliance. It is worth tracking the upcoming standard lists and local pilot policies closely.

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