FES BRIEFING CHINA’S REGULATIONS ON ALGORITHMS Context, impact, and comparisons with the EU January 2023 SUMMARY • China has advanced a powerful framework for regulating algorithms. • The regulations are likely to have a positive impact upon platform work by enforcing trans­parency on algorithmic management decisions and incorporating social stakeholders in algo­rithm design. • The regulations provide important indications of how AI and algorithms can be regulated in the public interest, from which European poli­cymakers can draw important insight to guide their efforts. INTRODUCTION On 1 March 2022, China’s Regulations on the Administration of Internet Information Service Recommendation Algorithms (hereafter,‘Regulations’) entered into effect(Creemers et al., 2022). The new Chinese provisions, consisting of 35 brief articles, constitute a sweeping and comprehensive effort to regulate the use of‘algorithmic recommendation services’ across society – addressing spheres ranging from news and social media and e-commerce to fraud prevention and plat­form work. As such, the regulations cover virtually all forms of recommendation and decision-making algorithms. Algorithms are automated recommendation-generat­ing and/or decision-making pieces of code. Combined with the exponential increase in available data and powered by new machine-learning(ML) and artificial intelligence(AI) applications, algorithmic recommen­dation systems are developed to dynamically respond to new data, changing user inputs, newly available content/options and evaluations of previous results in order to make decisions which produce pre-established outcomes(Rana and Jain, 2015). This short report contextualises the Regulations underlying China’s dual imperatives in the area of digital economy pol­icymaking: a long-standing techno-nationalist effort racing toward the technological frontier of digital technologies (Rikap and Lundvall, 2021), while preserving social stability during a period of socio-technical upheaval. Rather than simply challenging‘big tech’, then, the Regulations ultimately constitute elements of a broader effort to socially legitimise their implementation while strengthening their effectiveness and core functions. 1