<![CDATA[Sinocities: Gazetteer]]>https://sinocities.org/s/the-gazetteerhttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xnPI!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9d4ea1ae-9808-493f-b5ad-caf23cc6de7d_1280x1280.pngSinocities: Gazetteerhttps://sinocities.org/s/the-gazetteerSubstackWed, 23 Sep 2026 22:50:45 GMT<![CDATA[Introducing The Gazetteer ]]>https://sinocities.org/p/introducing-the-gazetteerhttps://sinocities.org/p/introducing-the-gazetteerWed, 23 Sep 2026 11:32:17 GMT

For a while now I’ve been building something underneath the longer essays: the China Innovation Atlas, a map of where China’s emerging industries are located, beyond Beijing/Shanghai/Shenzhen, but all ~370 prefectures, drawn from official data sources, government bureaus, and news media alike.

The Atlas answers a where question: which city just broke ground on a fab, which bureau just issued a new subsidy or talent attraction policy, where the money and the announcements are clustering. That record is worth sharing on its own. So I’m starting a companion to this newsletter: The Gazetteer.

The Gazetteer is a weekly, geolocated read on China’s tech economy — industry news and local-government policy, each item tied to the city it happened in, pulled straight from the Atlas. In the spirit of China’s own local gazetteers or “difang zhi” (地方志), the official record of a place that has been kept across many dynasties and into the present. It’s less commentary than a record: what happened this week, and where.

My monthly essays aren’t going anywhere: the longer arguments, the opinions, or the views of specific places through writing. The Gazetteer is the data feed beneath them, an ongoing signal for readers who want to keep apace of China’s dizzying tech scene more frequently. If that’s not for you, nothing changes; you’ll keep getting the essays exactly as before.

Finally, caveats: this will be a work in progress. New data sources may be added and/or removed to get a more accurate and curated picture of meaningful information. Some readers may find the level of detail too granular or too much, so that’s why I’m making it opt-in and within a new section of Sinocities galled The Gazetteer.

Welcome to The Gazetteer — the new weekly companion to the essays: China's tech economy, place by place, from the Atlas. You're getting it as a Sinocities subscriber; not for you? One click below the email turns off just the Gazetteer section, longer essays and features untouched.

Here is a taste of what will come, with today’s headlines.

China Tech & Policy, 23 September 2026

16 Sept – 23 Sept 2026 · 31 developments across 7 sectors · 16 policy actions across 6 cities from the China Innovation Atlas

China’s tech sector is consolidating competitive advantage across hardware, chips, and robotics while racing to commercialize AI infrastructure at scale—Xiaomi’s multimodal LLM, T-Head’s custom silicon, and a wave of humanoid robotics launches all signal vertical integration plays. Subnational governments are reinforcing this momentum with targeted tax incentives and innovation-center subsidies, though supply-chain vulnerabilities persist: surgical robotics surge 200%+ in revenue but servo systems remain import-dependent, while chip capacity constraints won’t ease until 2027.

🗺 This week, on the map

Every headline below is geolocated to its city. See where the week’s activity clustered on the interactive Atlas — bubbles sized by activity, coloured by sector.

Explore on the map →

Artificial Intelligence

Semiconductors

New Energy Vehicles

Robotics

Autonomous Vehicles

Biotech

Energy

Local Policy — city by city

Beijing

Zhengzhou

Guangzhou

Shenzhen

Changchun

Xi’an

Compiled from the China Innovation Atlas — aggregated tech news (reported/unverified) and official municipal announcements, geolocated to the prefecture. Explore the interactive map, city profiles and policy layer at atlas.sinocities.org.

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