China’s Global Digital Trade Expo 2026: what it changes for foreign firms, and what it does not

The fifth Global Digital Trade Expo runs in Hangzhou from 23 to 27 September 2026. It is useful for meeting Chinese buyers and platforms, and it changed no law. Premier Li Qiang pledged wider market access; the pledge has no text yet. The licences, filings and data rules that decide entry are the ones already in force.

From abroad, a trade fair with a premier on stage reads like a policy event. This week’s coverage from Hangzhou invites that reading: a pledge of wider market access, a hall of AI models, purchase figures near a billion US dollars. The fair is worth a foreign company’s attention. The rules it must clear did not move.

What is the Global Digital Trade Expo (数贸会), and when does it run?

The Global Digital Trade Expo (数贸会) is a government trade fair in Hangzhou, and its fifth edition runs from 23 to 27 September 2026.^⁠[1] It is hosted by the Zhejiang Provincial People’s Government and the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM), and organised by the Hangzhou municipal government, Zhejiang’s commerce department and MOFCOM’s trade development bureau.^⁠[2] This is not a private conference with a ministry logo on it; the hosts are the ministry and the province.

The 2026 theme is 在数贸会遇见AI未来, roughly “meet the AI future at the expo”, and Malaysia and Hungary are the guest countries of honour.^⁠[1] The organisers gave the fair 170,000 square metres, said international exhibitors exceed 20% of the total, and put AI companies above a third of exhibitors.^⁠[1]

Did the expo change any rules for foreign companies?

No. Premier Li Qiang spoke at the launch ceremony on 24 September 2026. He pledged that China will further relax market access (进一步放宽市场准入) and improve the policy for cross-border e-commerce retail imports.^⁠[3] He also said China will strengthen digital trade standards, basic data systems and regulatory models.^⁠[3] No measure, number or in-force date accompanied the speech; a pledge in a premier’s address is a direction, not a rule.

The direction was already written down in March. The outline of the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) promises to expand opening of telecoms and the internet in an orderly way (有序), and to run the value-added telecom opening pilots steadily (稳妥).^⁠[4] It also promises efficient, convenient and secure cross-border data flows, and an early trial of the WTO e-commerce agreement.^⁠[4] Both qualifiers are doing real work: the same outline keeps the pilots as pilots.

How much can you trust the expo’s headline figures?

Read them as the hosts’ running counts, released in stages, and never add two of them together. The organisers and state media published three sets in three weeks, each larger than the last.

Announced	Countries and organisations	Buyers	Orders and exhibitors
7 September	121 countries and regions, 29 international organisations	About 40,000 registered, over 12,000 international	US$977 million in pre-arranged international orders⁠[1]
15 September	132 countries and regions, 40 international organisations confirmed	Not restated	Over 1,300 matchmaking activities planned⁠[5]
24 September	Buyers from 163 countries and regions	Over 50,000 registered, over 12,000 international	US$1.085 billion pre-arranged purchase list;⁠[6] over 2,000 exhibitors⁠[7]

The growth is registration continuing, not a contradiction, but nothing in the series is an audited result. A pre-arranged purchase order (预筹国际采购订单) is an intention recorded before the fair. The 4th edition closed in September 2025 claiming RMB 161.98 billion in intended investment and trade signings and RMB 30.9 billion in purchases, with 71.5% of orders international.^⁠[8] No audit of how much of the intended figure became trade has been published. The 2026 closing figures are due around 27 September, and the same reading applies to them.

Can you sell to Chinese consumers without a Chinese company?

Yes, within set limits, through cross-border e-commerce retail import (跨境电商零售进口). The channel charges no tariff, and levies import VAT and consumption tax at 70% of the normal amount.^⁠[9] The caps are RMB 5,000 an order and RMB 26,000 a person a year, for goods bought for personal use.^⁠[10] It reaches consumers only: no distributor, no resale.

This is the channel Li Qiang’s pledge names, so the limits and the eligible-goods list are where any post-expo change would land first. Until a measure is published, the figures above stand. How the bonded route works from a warehouse inside China, and what the channel cannot do, is in our piece on bonded zones. Whether you need an entity at all starts at do I need a Chinese company to sell in China.

Can a foreign company run a website, app or AI service in China?

Within a 50% ownership cap for most value-added telecom services, with full ownership possible inside four pilot areas, and only with the AI filings done.^⁠[11,12] None of this moved this week.

Rule	What it says
Ownership cap增值电信业务	The foreign share of a value-added telecom service is capped at 50%, except e-commerce, domestic multi-party communications, store-and-forward services and call centres (negative list item 12, in force 1 November 2024)⁠[11]
Closed sectors	Internet news, online publishing, online audio-visual services, internet culture (music excepted) and public information release services are closed to foreign investment, except content China already opened in its WTO accession commitments (item 13)⁠[11]
Pilot areas	In approved pilot areas in Beijing, Shanghai (the Lingang New Area and the Pudong leading area), the Hainan Free Trade Port and Shenzhen, the foreign-share limit is lifted for internet data centres, content delivery networks, internet access and online data and transaction processing, among others. The item-13 sectors stay excluded, and each entrant needs a pilot approval from MIIT (工信部通信函〔2024〕107号, 8 April 2024)⁠[12]
Generative AI生成式人工智能	A generative AI service offered to the public in China falls under the Interim Measures (Article 2); one with public-opinion attributes or social mobilisation capacity needs a security assessment and an algorithm filing (Article 17); where a service provided from outside China does not comply, the CAC notifies the relevant institutions to take technical and other necessary measures against it (Article 20)⁠[13]
AI content labels	AI-generated content needs an implicit label in its file metadata, and an explicit label where the deep-synthesis rules already require one (Articles 5 and 4, in force 1 September 2025)⁠[14]

The pilot areas are the door the Five-Year Plan says will open steadily.^⁠[4] Which licence a product needs, and whether a pilot area fits it, is a structuring question before it is a filing question.

What happens to the data a China business collects?

It can leave China only through a lawful route, and the smallest operations often qualify for none of the heavy ones. The Personal Information Protection Law (个人信息保护法) reaches processing outside China that aims to provide products or services to people in China (Article 3).^⁠[15] Such a processor must set up a dedicated body or appoint a representative inside China (Article 53).^⁠[15] The routes out are a security assessment, a standard contract filing or certification (Article 38); operators of critical information infrastructure and high-volume processors must store the data in China (Article 40).^⁠[15]

Route	When it applies
Exempt	Transfers necessary to conclude or perform a contract with the individual, cross-border shopping and payment among the examples, and providers of non-sensitive personal information of fewer than 100,000 people (Article 5)⁠[16]
Standard contract or certification	Non-sensitive personal information of 100,000 to 1,000,000 people, or sensitive personal information of fewer than 10,000 (Article 8)⁠[16]
CAC security assessment	Non-sensitive personal information of 1,000,000 people or more, or sensitive personal information of 10,000 or more (Article 7)⁠[16]

For a consumer brand selling through cross-border e-commerce, the contract exemption covers much of ordinary retailing. Which route a specific flow needs is a judgement to settle with your adviser before the first Chinese user record exists, not after.

What do US, UK and EU rules add?

Rules at home can decide as much as the Chinese ones, and all three jurisdictions have moved within two years. They are stated here as sourced fact; what they mean for your company is a question for counsel in that country.

Jurisdiction	Measure	Effect
US	BIS licence review policy, 13 January 2026⁠[17]	Export licence applications for Nvidia H200, AMD MI325X and similar AI chips to China are reviewed case by case, subject to security requirements, instead of under a presumption of denial
US	Outbound Investment Security Program (31 CFR Part 850), effective 2 January 2025⁠[18]	Prohibits, or requires notification of, certain US-person investments in semiconductor, quantum and AI entities of China, Hong Kong and Macau included
EU	GDPR adequacy decisions⁠[19]	China is not on the EU’s adequacy list, so a transfer of personal data to China cannot rest on adequacy
EU	Irish DPC decision on TikTok, 2 May 2025⁠[20]	€530 million in fines under Articles 46(1) and 13(1)(f) GDPR, over EEA personal data remotely accessed by staff in China; TikTok has challenged the decision in the Irish courts
UK	UK GDPR adequacy regulations⁠[21]	No adequacy regulations cover China; a restricted transfer needs an Article 46 safeguard plus a transfer risk assessment

Is a deal signed at a trade fair binding?

It can be, and that includes the intention documents. Under the Civil Code, a subscription, order or reservation document in which the parties agree to conclude a contract within a set period is itself a preliminary contract (预约合同) (Article 495).^⁠[22] A party that then fails to conclude the contract can be held liable for breaching the preliminary one.^⁠[22] A document headed “intention” is not automatically soft.

Enforcement is the other half. China has been a party to the New York Convention since 22 April 1987, with the reciprocity and commercial reservations.^⁠[23] An arbitral award made in another contracting state can therefore be taken to a Chinese court.^⁠[23] Foreign court judgments travel less predictably. The Supreme People’s Court’s Guiding Case No. 235, released on 25 November 2024, confirms the 2022 Shanghai recognition of two English commercial judgments on the basis of legal reciprocity (法律互惠).^⁠[24]

Which forum belongs in your contract is for your lawyer. What the stand-side paperwork commits you to commercially is a reading question, and the time to ask it is before signature: that reading is what a contract commercial review is for.

What should you do before meeting Chinese buyers at a fair?

In this order, because the first two cannot be fixed afterwards.

1. File the trademark first, Chinese-character version included. China gives a mark to whoever files it, and a name shown at a fair can be filed by someone else that week. How that happens, and the subclass traps, are in our piece on first-to-file.
2. Fix the route before you price. A consumer product can test China through cross-border e-commerce within the limits above; a regulated digital service needs the cap, pilot and filing questions answered first.
3. Map the data. Decide where Chinese user records will sit, and which export route fits, before the first record exists.
4. Take export controls to counsel at home. The US, UK and EU measures above move faster than the Chinese ones; a licensing question discovered at the stand is months too late.
5. Treat stand-side paperwork as contract paper. A 预约合同 binds (Article 495 above);^⁠[22] know what an intention letter commits you to before signing it.

None of this requires you to travel. If the fair matters to you and nobody from your side can attend, trade fair and exhibition representation exists for exactly that.

What is still unsettled, as at 25 September 2026?

• The closing figures. The expo ends on 27 September 2026, and the 4th edition published its results on its final day.^⁠[8] Expect intended-signing totals, and read them as intentions.
• The cross-border e-commerce pledge. No text implementing Li Qiang’s 24 September remarks had been published by 25 September 2026.^⁠[3] Whether the RMB 26,000 annual limit^⁠[10] or the eligible-goods list moves is open.
• The telecom pilots. The Five-Year Plan keeps them as pilots, to be run steadily;^⁠[4] no national rollout is announced.
• The TikTok transfer decision. The Irish fine and orders are under challenge before the Irish courts,^⁠[20] so the final shape of EU enforcement on China transfers is not settled.

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