Field Notes

1688 vs Alibaba prices: what each number includes

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Search for the comparison and the question people type is one line: which is cheaper? After reading both platforms’ own pages, the answer stops being a price answer. The two listings are quotes on different bases.

Both belong to the same group. Alibaba Group calls 1688 “China’s leading integrated domestic wholesale marketplace” (Alibaba Group business page, fetched 11 Oct 2026); Alibaba.com puts its buyers in “190+ countries and regions” and calls itself wholesale-only (Alibaba Buyer Central, fetched 11 Oct 2026). Domestic and cross-border: everything below follows.

The same part, two quotes, line by line

Line on the quote	1688	Alibaba.com
Who it is priced for	businesses and individuals buying inside China	businesses buying to resell across a border; the terms say the site does not target consumers
Currency	the listing and the order are in CNY	whatever the quote names; the buyer can settle in another currency, converted at checkout
The tax line	the order amount is tax-inclusive by default	exports are zero-rated, so no domestic VAT line
Invoice	增值税专用发票 or 普通发票, by agreement with the seller	not part of the listing
Freight	a separate charge unless the listing says 包邮	a separate charge; the trade term says which leg is inside
MOQ	per listing; the shown price is the price at the smallest tier	per supplier, and often per colour, size or model
Trade term	normally not stated	EXW, FOB, CIF, DAP or DDP, named in the quote
Export clearance	not part of a domestic sale	depends on the term
Import duty and destination tax	not applicable	the buyer’s, unless the term is DDP
Price validity	a listing price, read live from the page	the seller’s own validity window
Who can force a fix	platform dispute rules can delist an item and extend the seller’s settlement period	the platform states it is not a party to the contract

Sources, row by row: the 1688 invoice rule (revised 27 Jun 2025) and freight rule (revised 17 Oct 2025); its Wiki page (published 10 Sep 2026) for tier prices and the live-price caveat; Alibaba.com’s FOB/CIF/EXW, shipping-cost and low-MOQ guides, all 30 Jun 2026; a help-centre answer on paying in a currency other than the quoted one; and its Terms of Use, clauses 1.2, 1.3, 7.1 and 7.4 (updated 11 Mar 2026, effective 17 Mar 2026). All fetched 11 Oct 2026.

Why the two numbers do not match

The tax line is the largest item in the gap

The 1688 invoice rule obliges sellers to invoice and sets the default in the same sentence: “the actual transaction amount defaults to a tax-inclusive price” (交易订单实际成交金额默认为含税价). Its FAQ goes further: a product page noting that no invoice will be issued is called illegal, and the platform says it will support the buyer.

Chinese VAT is a price-plus tax: the sales amount excludes the VAT, and the tax must be stated separately on the transaction voucher (增值税法, article 7, adopted 25 Dec 2024, in force 1 Jan 2026). A printed 22.60 is two numbers under one label — 20.00 of goods and 2.60 of tax at the 13% rate for goods (article 10(1)). On the export side that line does not exist: exports are zero-rated (article 10(4)), and the seller’s input tax goes into the refund system instead.

The refund rate is not always 13%

Where the finance ministry and the tax administration have not set a rate for a product, the refund rate is the product’s own applicable rate — 13% for most goods (财政部税务总局公告 2026年第11号, signed 30 Jan 2026, in force 1 Jan 2026). Producers use exempt-credit-refund; trading companies without production use exempt-refund, and a buyer that exports what it bought can recover the tax on the invoice. A small-scale seller’s goods take the levy rate, and where a special invoice is issued, the lower of the invoice rate and the export refund rate (same announcement, section 3(2)).

Named products have had rates cut: from 1 December 2024, aluminium, copper and chemically modified oils lost the refund entirely, and some refined oil, photovoltaic, battery and non-metallic mineral items fell from 13% to 9% (财政部税务总局公告 2024年第15号, 15 Nov 2024); from 1 April 2026 photovoltaic items lost the refund and batteries went from 9% to 6%, with the battery refund gone from 1 January 2027 (财政部税务总局公告 2026年第2号, 8 Jan 2026). Where the invoice rate is above the refund rate, the difference stays in the buyer’s cost.

The per-product rates are not a web page: the tax administration publishes them as a library placed on its own controlled FTP system, for local offices to download and pass to exporters (税总货劳函〔2026〕86号, 2026B版, 5 Jun 2026).

The refund rate also follows the invoice. A small-scale invoice carries 3%, or 1% while the current relief is in force (国家税务总局公告 2023年第1号, 9 Jan 2023, article 5; the 3% levy rate is article 11 of the VAT law; the relief runs to 31 December 2027 under 财政部税务总局公告 2023年第19号, issued 1 Aug 2023, article 3).

Without invoices there is a fallback: in a cross-border e-commerce pilot zone, retail exports with no valid purchase voucher can be exempt from VAT and consumption tax if the seller is registered in the zone, declares through the zone’s platform, and the goods are not on the cancelled list (财税〔2018〕103号, issued 28 Sep 2018, effective 1 Oct 2018). Exempt is not refunded.

The freight leg is not the same leg

Alibaba.com’s buyer guide says buyers “receive a product price first, then discover that freight, duties, clearance, or door delivery changes the real cost”, and warns against comparing an EXW price with a DDP price without adding the missing logistics costs (shipping cost guide, 30 Jun 2026). Its DDP page adds the qualification that decides the question: a DDP quote can include freight, clearance, duties, taxes and delivery “but only when the quoted scope says so” (DDP shipping guide, updated 30 Jun 2026).

On 1688 freight is separate unless the listing is marked 包邮, and the platform keeps a dispute rule about who pays it back and what counts as proof. Its encyclopedia puts domestic delivery at roughly ¥5–8 per kilo with a live-quote caveat — an editorial estimate about one seller, not a rate card (1688 Wiki, 10 Sep 2026). FOB carries delivery to the export port inside the price; the domestic listing leaves the whole journey outside it.

MOQ is a unit, not a number

On 1688 the price shown is the smallest quantity tier, and unit price falls as quantity rises; the encyclopedia’s worked example runs three tiers (1–9, 10–49, 50+ pieces) and calls 100+ pieces the deep band (1688 Wiki, 10 Sep 2026). On Alibaba.com MOQ is per supplier and often per variant, and the guide’s first instruction is to ask what it applies to: total pieces, one colour, one size, one model, one carton, or a production run (low MOQ guide, 30 Jun 2026). Two MOQ figures that never said what they were counting cannot be ranked.

Currency, validity, and who can force a fix

One platform lists in CNY. On the other, the quote currency is the seller’s to name, and the buyer is not stuck with it — the help centre offers a conversion at checkout for “order payment with non-USD currencies” (Help Center, fetched 11 Oct 2026). The renminbi central parity was 6.7330 to the dollar on 9 October 2026 (PBOC, 9 Oct 2026). A 1688 listing is repriced silently when the seller edits it; an export quote is a currency position from the moment it is issued. What a China factory quote contains works through that line.

Enforcement differs too, and it surfaces as a price. The invoice rule is a remedy: an invoice within 15 days for sellers in the invoice-assurance service or 30 days otherwise, then, per violation, delisting on the first two, delisting plus a 7-day extension of the seller’s settlement period on violations three and four, and 14 days from the fifth. Alibaba.com says the opposite about itself — that it “does not represent either the seller or the buyer in specific transactions” and that buyers and sellers are “solely responsible” for terms from payment and returns through shipping, insurance, fees and taxes (Terms of Use, clauses 7.1 and 7.4, updated 11 Mar 2026). It moves the cost of things going wrong, not the unit price.

Putting two quotes on one basis

For an exporting buyer, the net cost of a domestic purchase per piece is:

net = Q − (Q ÷ (1 + r)) × min(r, d)

where Q is the tax-inclusive quote, r the rate on the invoice and d the refund rate for the product. A domestic general taxpayer deducts the input tax the same way.

The numbers below are my construction, not published quotes. The part is quoted on 1688 at CNY 22.60 including 13% VAT, and on Alibaba.com at USD 3.10 FOB at MOQ 500.

Quote	r	d	Net per piece	How
1688, CNY 22.60, MOQ 100, general taxpayer	13%	13%	CNY 20.00	22.60 ÷ 1.13; the 2.60 comes back
Same listing, product whose refund rate was cut to 9%	13%	9%	CNY 20.80	20.00 + 2.60 input − 1.80 refund
1688, CNY 21.50, MOQ 100, small-scale seller at 1%	1%	13%	CNY 21.29	refund capped at 1%, i.e. 0.21
Alibaba.com, USD 3.10 FOB at 6.7330	—	—	CNY 20.87	includes inland delivery to the port

Read the rows against each other. The printed gap between CNY 22.60 and CNY 20.87 is 8.3%. Strip the tax and the two sit 4.4% apart, which is the inland leg inside the FOB number. The third row surprises people: a quote 4.9% cheaper than the first costs 6.4% more after the refund, because the invoice rate caps what can come back. Change the buyer and the ranking reverses: someone who cannot recover VAT pays 22.60 against 21.50.

Four things that look like a price advantage

A lower number with a 1% invoice. Less VAT passed on, and a refund capped at the same 1%.
A price with no invoice. The 1688 default is tax-inclusive, and the rule’s FAQ calls a “no invoice” note on the page illegal. Not a discount.
Freight folded into the price. A 包邮 listing has domestic delivery inside the number. Structure, not a saving.
FOB read as landed. FOB ends when the goods are on board; duty, clearance and final delivery sit outside unless the term says otherwise. Incoterms in one page.

How I checked this

Fetched in one sitting, 11 October 2026: two 1688 rule pages, one 1688 encyclopedia page, both platforms’ terms and buyer guides, the group’s business description, one help-centre answer, and eight tax and customs documents with their issue and effective dates. The 1688 rule pages render in the client: the plain URL returns an empty shell and the text appeared only at the hash route, so every quote from them was read in a browser. Every number carries its source and read date; the arithmetic is mine, run twice, and the percentages are computed from the rounded per-piece figures above.

What I could not check

Per-product export refund rates. Published as a library on the tax administration’s controlled FTP system (税总货劳函〔2026〕86号), not a page I can read; I did not open any attached product list from the announcements that cut rates.
Whether Alibaba.com collects destination VAT or sales tax on orders, and on what basis. I retried its help centre: the non-USD payment answer loads and is cited above; the pages on EU VAT and US sales tax did not return text, and I cited nothing I could not load.
Whether a particular listing is tax-inclusive in practice. The rule sets the platform default; what one seller does is not something a public page tells me.
The ¥5–8 per kilo freight figure. A platform editorial estimate with a live-quote caveat, about one seller, and my only source for it.
The no-invoice exemption route in practice. A 2018 notice for retail export from pilot zones; whether an order qualifies depends on the zone and the declaration. I did not test it.
Any typical MOQ range. The MOQ guide I cite gives none, and the seller-blog pages that do carry no method note, so no range is in the body.
Any real quote. The two prices above are my construction, to show the arithmetic, not offers. Nothing here is advice about where to buy.

Getting a phone number in China: channels and prices

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Do you need a Chinese phone number to visit China? No. Several routes work with a foreign number or none, and the state guide for foreign business visitors assumes it: Alipay, WeChat and UnionPay accounts can be registered with foreign or Chinese phone numbers, metro fare gates in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chengdu take overseas-issued bank cards, and train tickets can be bought on the 12306 English website or app with a passport (A Guide to Working and Living in China for Business Expatriates, 2026 edition, issued 2026-05-29, PDF downloaded 2026-10-11).

A mainland number matters in three cases: a Chinese-language service whose form takes only +86 numbers; SMS codes from Chinese platforms; or a stay long enough that a local plan beats roaming.

Does a local number change anything?

Task	With a foreign number	What a +86 number adds
Pay in shops	Alipay, WeChat, UnionPay; Visa, Mastercard, UnionPay, Amex, JCB, Diners and Discover cards can be added	Nothing required
Metro	Tickets at machines; overseas-issued cards at fare gates in four cities	Alipay QR code at the gate
Bus	Cash, exact change required; transit card bought against a passport; QR boarding in Alipay	Alipay QR code boarding
Ride-hailing	Alipay “Transport” then “Taxi”; WeChat “Pay and Services” then “Travel Service” or “DiDi Ride-Hailing”; the DiDi app, which the guide says registers with international phone numbers	A driver can call and text you
Train tickets	12306 English website and app: passport-only registration, email address, no phone field	The Chinese-language 12306 site and app, and order SMS
Hospital appointment	Passport accepted as the ID type, plus a mobile number	SMS confirmations that arrive
Food delivery	Meituan’s policy requires a mobile number for an account	The same, on a number that receives Chinese SMS

Payment, metro, bus, ride-hailing and train rows are from the 2026 MOFCOM guide (link, 2026-05-29). The Chinese 12306 form’s phone field offers one country code, +86 中国大陆, capped at 11 digits and verified by SMS; the English registration page accepts only foreign passports and asks for passport details, a date of birth, a username and an email address, with no phone field (Chinese page, English page, both read 2026-10-11). A municipal hospital booking platform requires a real name, ID number, mobile number and address, and accepts passports (platform notice, read 2026-10-11); one international hospital’s guide starts with a phone number and SMS code, then a face check, then document type, number and address (hospital guide, 2025-11-25). Meituan’s privacy policy requires at least a mobile number to create an account (Meituan rules centre, dated 2026-05-28, read 2026-10-11).

No page says the number must be mainland; none says a foreign number works. The verification is an SMS, which I cannot test.

The channels

Channel	Where	What it needs	Price published
Airport one-stop service point	International arrivals hall	Passport, in person	No
Carrier service hall in town	营业厅 run by the carrier	Passport, in person	Yes, in tariff filings
Carrier online store for foreigners	Mail; activation by email	Passport photo, SIM photo, selfie holding both	Yes, in US dollars
Mainland eSIM	Carrier hall	eSIM-capable mainland handset, real-name check	Same plans as physical SIM
International travel eSIM	Bought before you fly	Nothing else	Third-party seller prices

Airport. Since 2025-01-01 the two Beijing airports have “北京服务” points at the arrivals level, and Beijing Unicom supplies three tiers of short-term card for a joint bank-card-and-SIM terminal there, deactivated at expiry (Beijing municipal government, 2025-01-13). The capital airport’s point, outside exit B, had served more than 110,000 foreign passengers by August 2025 (CAAC News, 2025-08-07). Pudong’s Terminal 2 station opened 2024-06-29 and runs 24 hours; Xinhua names the product at its telecom window as 7-, 15- and 30-day China Telecom cards sold against a passport (english.shanghai.gov.cn, 2024-06-29; Xinhua, 2024-07-01).

Carrier halls. The 2026 guide says to bring a passport or a Foreign Permanent Resident ID Card to a China Telecom, China Mobile or China Unicom service centre (link, 2026-05-29). Not every hall handles them: China Telecom’s filing limits its foreigner cards to halls with permission to process them (filing, read 2026-10-11).

Online. Unicom’s foreigner-facing store mails a SIM and activates it after you email your passport page, the SIM’s ICCID side, and a selfie holding both (store page, read 2026-10-11). Delivery inside the mainland is free and takes 2 to 3 days; international delivery is 15 US dollars for the first card and 5 for each additional one, 7 to 14 business days (store page, read 2026-10-11). One eligibility line excludes passport holders from six named countries — Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Indonesia — while a second copy carries no exclusion, and I could not tell which path each governs. No other carrier runs a store like it.

eSIM. Two products share the name. A mainland eSIM is an ordinary number: all three carriers were cleared by the industry ministry for commercial trials in October 2025 and put the service on sale nationwide (Xinhua, 2025-10-14; Shanghai’s government news page, 2025-10-15, read 2026-10-11). During the trial you activate it at a carrier-owned hall — China Telecom’s path is to book in the app and then go to the hall you booked (Xinhua, 2025-10-14). Plans and tariffs stay level with ordinary mobile service, the switch itself is free for now, and one handset can hold at most two mainland eSIM numbers, each from a different carrier if you like (China News Weekly’s walk through the carriers’ notices, 2025-10-31, read 2026-10-11). China Mobile’s trial terms allow only handsets launched in mainland China, and an eSIM counts toward the five-number limit on one ID (Beijing News, 2025-10-15). An international travel eSIM is a roaming product sold by third parties: its number belongs to a foreign operator, so it is not a mainland number and gets no mainland SMS.

What real-name registration requires

A 2013 ministry order, still in force, requires valid identification before a number is connected, and a foreign citizen’s passport is on the list of accepted documents (MIIT Order No. 25, issued 2013-07-16, effective 2013-09-01, articles 6 and 7). It records the document’s type and the name, number and address on it, and must refuse service when the customer will not show ID, uses someone else’s document or presents a forged one (articles 9 and 10). The 2022 anti-fraud law added the enforcement layer: it forbids issuing more cards than the national cap allows, lets an operator refuse a suspicious application and re-check identity later, and allows suspension of a number that fails re-verification (Anti-Telecom and Online Fraud Law, passed 2022-09-02, articles 9 to 11). The cap is five cards per user per carrier nationwide (MIIT notice 工信部网安函〔2016〕452号, 2016-11-07); the same notice requires the counter to photograph the applicant and keep the picture, and a provincial MIIT office restates the ban on issuing a sixth card in a published case note (MIIT Hunan, 2023-04-26).

So at the counter you show the document itself and have your photograph taken there, both required by the texts above. China Telecom’s filing adds a prepaid account and a prepayment at least equal to the plan price, which I could not re-read today.

What the prices are

The filings addressed to foreign passport holders that I could find are China Telecom’s short-term cards. They are filed province by province, not as one national price list: the pages sit on the carrier’s provincial site, the plan numbers carry a province code and a year (24SH100222, 24SH100223, 24SH100224 for Shanghai), and the launch was announced by the provincial branch at 23 outlets across that city’s 16 districts (Shanghai municipal government, 2024-03-15). The same 15-day card is filed separately for Beijing at the same 125 yuan, as 24BJ100938 with a standard of 125元/15天 (China Telecom tariff zone, read 2026-10-11). Read these as two provinces’ filed prices, not a national rate card. Validity runs to a stated hour, and the card is decommissioned automatically.

Product	Validity	Price	Included	Overages
China Telecom foreigner 7-day card	day 1 to day 7, 24:00	85 yuan	100 min, 20 GB, 50 SMS	0.15 yuan/min, 5 yuan/GB, 0.1 yuan/SMS
China Telecom foreigner 15-day card	day 1 to day 15, 24:00	125 yuan	200 min, 30 GB, 50 SMS	same
China Telecom foreigner 30-day card	day 1 to day 30, 24:00	195 yuan	300 min, 50 GB, 50 SMS	same
China Unicom short-term, 7 days	7 days	25 US dollars	5 GB	1 yuan per 800 MB, 0.15 yuan/min, 0.15 yuan/SMS
China Unicom short-term, 15 days	15 days	35 US dollars	10 GB	same
China Unicom short-term, 30 days	30 days	42 US dollars	30 GB	same
China Unicom monthly	monthly plan	28 to 45 US dollars	5, 20 or 40 GB a month	same

Those China Telecom rows are the carrier’s filings, each stating eligibility as foreign individuals with a passport or a Foreign Permanent Resident ID Card, a prepaid account, a sales channel of permitted halls, and an online window of 2023-12-10 to 2026-11-30, with the price field printing per month even on the 7-day card (7-day, 15-day, 30-day, all read 2026-10-11). The same three prices were announced in March 2024, with the 85-yuan card given as 11.82 US dollars at that month’s rate (Shanghai municipal government, 2024-03-15), and the 7-day card’s 20 GB and 100 minutes repeat in the carrier’s own launch report (Sohu, quoting China Telecom Shanghai, 2024-03-15). The Unicom rows are from its foreigner-facing store (link, read 2026-10-11); one extra bundle line under the short-term tiers does not attach to any listed price.

China Mobile sells short-term tourist cards at its counters too: a 2025 municipal report describes 7-, 10-, 15- and 30-day tiers with up to 80 GB, 300 minutes and 100 yuan of international credit, expiring on their own (Beijing municipality, 2025-01-27). No carrier page I found publishes a price. The idea that airport counters cost more comes from travel blogs, not something I could check.

When you leave

For these prepaid tourist cards, nothing. China Telecom’s filings specify automatic decommissioning at expiry, China Unicom’s store says the short-term SIM terminates automatically after its validity period, and the Beijing products are described the same way (Beijing municipal government, 2025-01-13). Unused balance goes with the number.

Before your last day:

Whether to keep the number. China Unicom says it can convert a short-term SIM into a long-term or international plan. China Telecom’s foreigner cards list their operating limits as suspension, resumption, decommissioning, replacement and top-up (filing, read 2026-10-11).
The balance. China Unicom warns that a negative airtime balance can suspend the SIM.
Any account tied to the number — chat, payment, booking history — survives the card only if the number does.

How I checked

Ministry orders and the anti-fraud law, the state guide for foreign business visitors, carrier tariff filings, carrier-owned service pages, and municipal or airport pages on what the counters sell. Each figure carries the source’s own date; volatile pages were read on 2026-10-11.

Two pages I read twice: the state guide (the 2024 Chinese edition asked for a work permit and a domestic phone number to open a bank account; the 2026 English edition lists identity documents only) and the Unicom store’s eligibility line, which exists in two versions, one with the six excluded countries and one without.

One fetch problem to declare. The three China Telecom filing pages refused every request today, returning HTTP 412 to curl with browser headers, directly, through a proxy, and in a headless browser. What I read was the search-engine index of those exact URLs, which reproduces each plan number, validity wording, price, decommission rule and eligibility text, plus a second province’s filing for the same card. I did not re-read the pages themselves.

What I could not check

Whether a foreign passport works for eSIM phone service. Retried: the accounts conflict — a news reproduction of Unicom’s explainer lists a passport, a trade outlet’s copy of China Telecom’s guide lists passports, and a consumer site says both China Mobile and China Telecom take only a mainland ID card or Foreign Permanent Resident ID Card. All secondary; no carrier page I could open settles it.
Airport counter prices. Retried: described in government and news pages without prices, and no carrier price page would load.
Whether hospital or delivery platforms take a non-mainland number. Retried: their forms require a mobile number and verify by SMS; none states that the number must be mainland, none says a foreign number works. Travel guides claim Meituan takes international numbers at sign-up; no platform page says so.
Parts of the China Telecom filing text. Only the 30-day card’s 300 minutes, 50 GB and overage rates are reproduced in the index I could read. The 15-day card’s 200 minutes and 30 GB, the 50 SMS on each card, and the filing’s prepayment and operating-limits lines (suspension, resumption, decommissioning, replacement, top-up) all come from filing text I could not re-read.
DiDi’s mainland app. Retried: the 2026 MOFCOM guide says the app registers with international phone numbers, but that is a government document, not the company’s page.
The one-number limit on non-ID documents. Vendor copy claims holders of other documents may register only one number per carrier. I could not re-locate that claim today and no carrier or regulator text supports it; the official rule is five per carrier.
Opening hours of the airport SIM counters. Shanghai’s is documented as 24/7; I found no hours for the Beijing points.

Choosing a freight forwarder: reading the quote

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A forwarder’s quotation is a stack of other people’s rate cards. A few are published by law. Some are set by a terminal. Some are the forwarder’s own labour, priced by nobody else. Two quotes can sit far apart and both be honest, because the two sellers are not selling the same thing.

This page does not name forwarders or rank them. It sets out what each charge is, who owns it, why an all-in number resists comparison, and how to check whether the company quoting you may do the work. The ocean leg is in Container rates by route; who carries each task is in Incoterms in one page. This one is about the invoice.

The lines on a quote, and who owns each one

Origin and the ocean leg. All rates were read on 11 October 2026.

Line	Who sets the amount	Public card	Who pays	Note
Ocean freight, booking included	the carrier, in its own tariff or a negotiated rate	yes, and free to read (46 CFR 520.9(c)(2); FMC advisory, 4 January 2024)	buyer under FOB; seller under CFR/CIF	an index reading is not a quote; see the container-rates page
Origin terminal handling (港口作业包干费)	the terminal operator; a market price in China	yes, on the operator’s own published card	whoever the term puts at the port	the charging rules list what must be bundled inside it (港口收费计费办法, art. 36)
Cargo port dues (货物港务费)	government-set	yes, in the ministry’s rate table	the cargo side, or its agent	¥17 per 20ft and ¥34 per 40ft outbound; ¥34 and ¥68 inbound, on general-cargo boxes (rate table, 交水规〔2019〕2号, effective 1 April 2019)
Port facility security fee (港口设施保安费)	no longer a government price; it sits inside the terminal’s lump-sum handling fee as a sub-item, capped at the old rate	the cap is in the same rate table	the cargo side, or its agent	¥8 per 20ft and ¥12 per 40ft on laden boxes is the cap; its government price was cancelled on 1 April 2022 (交水发〔2022〕26号)
Export declaration (报关)	a customs broker; market price	no fee card found	seller under FCA/FOB, buyer under EXW	a broker must file with customs, which replaced the licence in 2022 (报关单位备案管理规定, 海关总署令第253号, effective 1 January 2022, read 11 October 2026)
Trucking to the port	a trucker, market price	none found	follows the term	waiting time and liftgate usually sit outside the line
Low-sulphur surcharge (LSS)	the carrier, per its own notice	no single card	follows the freight	the rule behind it is the IMO sulphur cap: 0.50% from 1 January 2020, 0.10% inside emission control areas (IMO, 20 December 2019)
Documentation, B/L, AMS, ISF entries	forwarder or carrier, market price	not on the customs fee table	follows the term	CBP’s own table carries arrival fees, MPF and HMF, and no AMS or ISF line (CBP user fee table, page updated 9 October 2026, read 11 October 2026)

Destination side. This is where two quotes diverge most, and where the published cards stop helping you.

Line	Who sets the amount	Public card	Who pays	Note
Destination terminal handling	the destination terminal	only if the operator chooses to publish one (46 CFR 525.2(a))	the buyer, under FOB and CIF alike	a published schedule must be reachable online, and a reasonable access charge is allowed (46 CFR 525.3)
Import clearance broker fee	a broker, market price	none	the buyer, except under DDP	a minimum fee is normal on small shipments
Merchandise Processing Fee	CBP	yes	the importer of record	0.3464% of value, minimum $34.58, maximum $670.86, plus $4.15 for a manual entry, required from 1 October 2026 (Federal Register, 31 July 2026; CBP user fee table, read 11 October 2026)
Harbor Maintenance Fee	statute, collected by CBP	yes	the importer of record	0.125% of value (CBP user fee table, citing Public Law 99-662, read 11 October 2026)
Duty and trade measures	customs, per the tariff schedule	yes	buyer, or seller under DDP	the one line a forwarder cannot negotiate
Demurrage: the box sitting in the terminal	the terminal	yes, in its schedule	whoever the schedule may invoice	see the trap below: free time can exclude weekends
Detention: the box out of the terminal	the carrier or the NVOCC	yes	same	a US invoice must issue within 30 days of the charge (46 CFR 541.7)
Storage, once it leaves the wharf	the terminal, market price	yes	the buyer	in China this is 库场使用费, priced by the operator (港口收费计费办法, art. 39–40)

Why an all-in price cannot be compared

Bundling is a choice, and in China it is a constrained one. Of the two port charges that used to be government prices, one still is. The security fee stopped being one on 1 April 2022, when the ministry and the NDRC folded it into the terminal’s lump-sum handling fee as a sub-item, capped at the old rate (交水发〔2022〕26号).

Two rules survive. An agent collecting the government-priced cargo dues on the owner’s behalf may not add a margin (same notice, part four). And the terminal’s lump-sum handling fee may not contain the government-priced items or other market-priced items, which are billed as separate lines (港口收费计费办法, art. 38, extended in 2024). A Chinese port invoice that cannot be broken down is a packaging choice, and the regulation gives you two lines to point at.

Three other reasons a single number resists comparison:

The endpoints differ. “All in” can mean to the port, to a rail ramp, or to your door. Three products, three prices, and the difference sits in a trucking market the quote never shows.

The risk boundary differs. Under CIF the seller arranges and pays carriage to the destination port while risk passes once the goods are on board at the shipment port (ICC Academy, 7 October 2024). Under DDP the seller carries import clearance and duty, and freight, duty and clearance collapse into one figure (ICC Academy). A DDP figure and an FOB figure cannot be compared line by line.

The clock differs. A quote with no validity date carries an unstated currency position. The renminbi appreciated 4.07% against the dollar between 7 January and 9 October 2026 on the PBOC central parity, 7.0187 to 6.7330 (7 January, 9 October).

Putting two quotes on one ruler

Eight questions, asked in writing, turn two quotes into a comparison.

Which Incoterm, and at which named place? FOB at one port and FOB at another are two products.
Which box type, and where does the carriage end? CY to CY, port to door, and door to door price differently.
What is the chargeable basis? Weight or measure for LCL, per container for FCL, chargeable weight with the volume divisor stated for air.
How many free days, and which days count? Ask for demurrage free time and detention free time separately, and whether weekends and closed holidays are excluded. In the terminal schedule below they are.
Which lines are pass-through at cost, with the third party’s invoice attached? In China the cargo port dues are the clearest case, because the regulation forbids a margin on them.
Which currency, converted at which date, and how long is the quote good for?
Which lines are optional? Cargo insurance, a customs bond, an ISF filing, chassis, liftgate, waiting time, and any per-diem after free time.
Which tariff rule does the ocean rate come from? Carriers must publish a tariff (46 CFR 520.3), and common carriers and conferences must give free public access to the publication system, in force since 1 February 2024 (FMC advisory, 4 January 2024). Ask for the rule number.

The two credentials, and how to check them

In China, a freight forwarder files with the commerce ministry. The instrument is the 2005 filing measures, 商务部令2005年第9号, effective 1 April 2005, amended in 2016 (text, gov.cn, read 11 October 2026). MOFCOM’s service description still lists that order as the legal basis, says the matter carries no fee, and puts the filing inside the 国际货运代理企业信息管理系统; the work runs through provincial commerce departments and, under 商服贸发〔2013〕11号, the national forwarders’ association (MOFCOM service description, read 11 October 2026). Results are queryable on the ministry’s disclosure platform, by name, place of business and service items (query page, read 11 October 2026). I read that list, not the filings behind it.

In China, an NVOCC files with the transport department. An NVOCC issues its own bill of lading and takes carrier liability, which the 国际海运条例实施细则 defines at article 3(4) (实施细则, 交通运输部令2023年第16号, fifth amendment, 10 November 2023). Its licence was cancelled by the State Council in 2019, so the requirement now is a filing: within 15 days of starting business, the company gives registration details to the provincial transport department where it is registered, or where business mainly happens (交办水函〔2019〕681号, 14 May 2019; 实施细则 art. 9). That notice left the freight-rate filing requirement unchanged. Provincial transport departments publish lists of filed operators; the latest I could read was dated 31 January 2025 (list page, read 11 October 2026). Ask for the filing receipt and the province.

In the United States, the check is the FMC. The Commission licenses ocean transportation intermediaries and requires proof of financial responsibility. Its public OTI list states what a listing means: a licensed forwarder has a licence and financial responsibility on file; a licensed NVOCC additionally has a current Form FMC-1 tariff filing; a foreign-based NVOCC has filed Form FMC-65 and a tariff (FMC OTI list, read 11 October 2026). The page carries the exclusion that matters: an NVOCC without an active Form FMC-1 is not on the list. It also publishes a weekly list of NVOCCs licensed or registered but with no tariff, contrary to 46 CFR 520.3, warned of a licence at risk (FMC, Non-Compliant NVOCCs, updated Fridays, read 11 October 2026). Check both lists, then read the tariff.

A licence says the company may act and has posted security, and nothing about service quality.

Four traps

Free time is not calendar time. One terminal’s published schedule allows four free days on inbound foreign-trade containers, exclusive of Saturdays, Sundays and the holidays on which the terminal is closed (TTI terminal schedule, Port of Long Beach, file posted July 2026, read 11 October 2026). The same page says a Saturday or Sunday counts if the terminal announces its gates are open. Four free days can burn through a weekend. Ask for the last free day as a date, not as a number.

Demurrage escalates in bands. The same schedule charges a box with an overall length of 21 to 40 feet $64.58 a day for the first five days, $128.13 a day for days six to ten, and $255.23 a day after that, with weekends and holidays included once free time has expired. A separate congestion fee of $100 a day for days 9 to 14 and $150 a day after sits on top of demurrage, in force since 10 January 2022.

Demurrage and detention have a rulebook worth quoting, and it just got shorter. The FMC’s billing rule requires an invoice within 30 days of the date the charge was last incurred, requires the bill of lading and container numbers on it, and provides that omitting required information removes the obligation to pay (46 CFR 541.5 to 541.7, 89 FR 14362, 26 February 2024, effective 28 May 2024). One section is gone: 46 CFR 541.4 limited who could be billed, the D.C. Circuit severed it in September 2025, and the Commission removed it effective 29 December 2025 (FMC final rule; World Shipping Council v. FMC, 152 F.4th 215 (D.C. Cir. 2025)). The rest of the rule stands. “You billed the wrong party” is a weaker argument than it was in 2024.

A documentation fee is a commercial price. AMS and ISF entries, B/L fees and file-handling charges are set by whoever bills them. If a pass-through is claimed, ask for the invoice behind it.

How this page was put together

Every figure was fetched or re-read on 11 October 2026. The Chinese rate figures come from the rate tables attached to the ministry’s 2019 charging rules, whose five-year term expired and was extended by a 2024 announcement (交水规〔2024〕4号, 6 April 2024); the security fee’s changed status comes from a 2022 notice, to which the 2024 announcement routes that item. The US figures come from the Federal Register notice setting FY2027 user fees, cross-read against CBP’s own fee table, which the agency warns may lag the notices. The demurrage numbers come from one terminal’s published schedule, named as an example, not as a recommendation. The FMC and eCFR rules are quoted from the current text, and one section was re-checked after I found it missing from the current CFR.

For the demand side, Google’s autocomplete was queried the same day. Completions for “china freight forwarder” run to “to usa”, “reddit”, “to india”, “to uk”, “to canada”, “to singapore” and “to nigeria”; strings starting “best china freight forwarder” and “cheapest china freight forwarder” return route names with “reddit” recurring. People search for a per-route name and for someone else’s experience. Neither answers whether the company may file the paperwork.

What I could not check

Whether the 2005 filing measures are still formally in force. MOFCOM still lists 商务部令2005年第9号 as the legal basis, and no repeal appeared. That is a reading of current pages, not a gazette search.
The filing records themselves. The public query returns names, places of business and service items. I did not open the filings behind any row.
China declaration and trucking rates. No fee card found. The customs filing duty is published; the price of the work is not.
Whether the national single window charges for a declaration. Not verified.
Current low-sulphur surcharge rates. The IMO rule is published; the amount is set carrier by carrier. I collected no LSS card, so treat that line as unverified.
A national picture of NVOCC filing lists. I read one provincial-level list, latest edition 31 January 2025. Other provinces publish in other formats and cycles.
Whether any specific terminal’s demurrage numbers are typical. I have one schedule, at one port. The bands and the escalation are the pattern to expect; the dollars are that terminal’s.
The FMC’s licence-status change lists. I read the landing pages and the non-compliant list, and did not page through the status-change records.

Customs clearance documents, and what has to match

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

One shipment is asked for documents four times: at the Chinese export declaration, by the carrier, at the destination entry, and again for a preferential rate. The rules are published, so the list is knowable before packing.

The Chinese export list is short and statutory

GACC Order 277, the declaration regulation, took effect on 1 May 2025. Article 8 lists the documents produced on declaration — contract, invoice, packing list, loading list or manifest, bill of lading or waybill, broker authorisation, licence documents and anything else GACC requires — and goods under inspection and quarantine add certificates. An export declaration is due at least 24 hours before loading, once the goods reach the customs supervision zone; an import declaration within 14 days of the means of transport being declared for entry, with a two-step filing, summary first, available on approval (Articles 7, 10).

Article 32 points back to the declaration fill-in rules, revised by GACC announcement 2018 No. 60 (in force 1 August 2018), which renamed the field “accompanying documents and number” for the certificate code.

Document	Issued by	Asked for by
Contract	Seller and buyer	China export declaration (Order 277 art. 8)
Commercial invoice	Seller	China art. 8; US entry (19 CFR 142.3); preferential rate claims
Packing list	Seller	China art. 8; US entry “where appropriate”
Loading list / manifest	Carrier or consolidator	China art. 8
Bill of lading or air waybill	Carrier	China art. 8; evidence for a retroactive origin certificate (Order 270 art. 11)
Broker authorisation agreement	Exporter or importer, to the broker	China art. 8, 14
Licence and inspection certificates	Competent authority	China art. 8; destination agency rules
Certificate of origin	Customs offices, CCPIT and its local arms (Order 270 art. 3)	Destination, where a rate or a non-preferential measure turns on origin
Declaration of origin	An approved exporter only	Destination, under RCEP
Importer Security Filing	ISF importer or agent	US CBP, vessel cargo, 24h before loading; two elements 24h before arrival
Entry summary (CBP Form 7501)	Importer of record	US CBP, within 10 days of release
Entry summary declaration	Carrier or operator, into ICS2	EU customs, before arrival
EORI number	Member state customs authority	EU customs, before any customs operation

The invoice is the document the destination reads

US invoice contents are enumerated in 19 CFR 141.86. Every charge is itemised by name and amount — freight, insurance, commission, packing — with anything absent from the body on an attachment. Country of origin is required, and so are assists: dies, moulds, tools and engineering work furnished for production and not in the invoice price.

Three clauses catch people. Paragraph (d) requires the invoice and all attachments in English or with an accurate translation. Paragraph (e) requires the invoice itself to state in detail what is in each individual package, so a separate packing list does not remove the requirement. Paragraph (j) is the one most often missed: the invoice must identify by name a responsible employee of the exporter who knows the transaction. Goods sold in transit need both the original and the resale invoice filed (paragraph (c)).

The EU asks for possession, not submission: a standard declaration carries all particulars needed for the procedure (UCC Article 162), and supporting documents must be in the declarant’s possession and at customs’ disposal when it is lodged (Article 163).

Origin papers: three routes, one of them self-issued

The Origin Regulations for Import and Export Goods, State Council Order 416, in force since 1 January 2005, cover non-preferential use: MFN treatment, anti-dumping and countervailing duties, safeguards, origin marking and quotas.

Proof	Applies to	Issued by	Validity
Non-preferential certificate of origin	MFN, AD/CVD, origin marking, quotas, statistics	Customs offices, CCPIT and its local arms	1 year (Order 270 art. 15, in force 1 Sep 2024)
Form E	China–ASEAN Free Trade Area	The exporting party’s issuing body	1 year (China–ASEAN certification procedures, rule 15); retroactive up to 12 months after shipment, noted in box 13
RCEP certificate of origin	RCEP parties	The exporting party’s issuing body	1 year (Order 255 art. 24, in force 1 Jan 2022)
RCEP declaration of origin	RCEP parties	An approved exporter, self-issued	1 year
Back-to-back proof	Goods re-exported unchanged from an intermediate party	Issuing body or approved exporter there	Matches the original

GACC Order 270, in force since 1 September 2024, governs non-preferential, GSP and regional preferential certificates in one text: the applicant files the invoice and origin materials (Article 5) and applies before or at shipment (Article 6); review is due within two working days (Article 7); a retroactive certificate is available within a year of shipment, with transport documents (Article 11).

Form E follows a separate procedure under the China–ASEAN rules of origin (upgraded protocol annex, read 11 Oct 2026): issued by the exporting party’s body, presented to the importing customs with the declaration, valid one year, origin criterion in box 8, and box 4 annotated where the importing customs refuses it.

RCEP is the route where the certificate is optional. Under GACC Order 255, in force since 1 January 2022, the origin proof is a certificate or a declaration of origin, written in English (Article 18). A declaration of origin may only be issued by an approved exporter, and carries that exporter’s number, a declaration number, the issuer’s name and signature, and the date (Article 21). Approval is separate: an approved exporter must be an Advanced Certified Enterprise, know the origin rules and keep complete origin records (GACC Order 254, in force 1 January 2022).

An importer claiming the RCEP rate files the origin proof, the invoice and transport documents for the whole journey (Article 26). For one batch worth no more than USD 200 the origin proof is waived, and splitting a consignment to use the waiver is disallowed (Article 28).

What the destination asks for that China never sees

The US filing with no Chinese counterpart is the Importer Security Filing: ten data elements in English, for vessel cargo (19 CFR 149.2 and 149.3). Seller, buyer, importer of record and consignee, plus manufacturer, ship-to party, country of origin and commodity HTSUS number, are due no later than 24 hours before loading at the foreign port; container stuffing location and consolidator no later than 24 hours before arrival. Goods are listed at the six-digit HTSUS level, and CBP’s ISF FAQ (11 May 2023) says the number must be the duty and statistical reporting number for the article; elements that change before the goods enter a US port must be updated.

19 CFR 142.3 governs entry: CBP Form 3461 or its electronic equivalent, evidence of the right to make entry, a commercial invoice, a packing list where appropriate, and other agency documents. CBP’s guidance (page last modified 6 January 2026) puts entry documents within 15 calendar days of arrival and the entry summary, with estimated duties, within 10 days of release; tariff lines come from the Harmonized Tariff Schedule.

An EORI number is mandatory for the clearance of all customs operations, one per person, issued by the member state where the operator is established or where a non-EU operator first intends to operate. It is needed to lodge declarations or act as a carrier; the format is a two-letter country code plus up to 15 alphanumerics, with public validation.

Measures, not only rates, sit in TARIC, which consolidates tariff measures with commercial and agricultural legislation, updates national administrations daily, and publishes raw data in Excel. The pre-arrival security filing is the entry summary declaration, filed into ICS2; for containerised sea cargo, Delegated Regulation (EU) 2015/2446, Article 105(a), sets it at the latest 24 hours before loading, and an incomplete declaration can be rejected.

When the papers disagree

In China, responsibility is explicit: under Order 277, Article 6, the declarant is liable for the truthfulness, accuracy, completeness and regularity of the declaration. Article 14 reaches the broker: one accepting the work must review the authenticity, validity and completeness of what the client supplied — description, use, origin, price, contract, invoice, transport and packing documents, licences and certificates — and a broker that skips it bears legal liability.

Origin documents carry their own sanctions: Article 23 of Order 416 fines obtaining a certificate of origin with false materials, or forging, altering, buying, selling or stealing one, at CNY 5,000 to CNY 100,000, and up to the value of the goods where it served for customs release.

At the destination a mismatch usually withdraws the rate instead of triggering a fine; the rules are written down:

RCEP: the rate does not apply where the goods in the origin proof do not match the goods imported, or the origin data is defective; a document verification the exporting party leaves unanswered for 90 days, or an on-site verification request unanswered for 30 days, also loses the rate (Order 255, Article 32).
China–ASEAN: the same mismatch provision, plus seals or signatures that do not match the records China holds, or an issuing body the exporting member never notified (Order 199, Article 17). With no valid certificate and no supplementary declaration before procedures are completed, the MFN or general rate applies, and a certificate produced after release does not adjust duty already assessed.
The EU: the declarant, and a customs representative lodging for it, is responsible for the accuracy of the data and the validity of the supporting documents (UCC Article 15(2)). A declaration may be amended after acceptance, but not once customs announces an examination, finds the particulars wrong or releases the goods; after release it needs an application within three years (Article 173).

19 U.S.C. 1592 (2024 edition) makes a material false document or statement, or a material omission, a violation when made by fraud, gross negligence or negligence, whether or not duty was lost; clerical errors and mistakes of fact are not violations unless part of a pattern of negligent conduct. Before a claim, CBP must issue a pre-penalty notice giving the facts, the laws allegedly violated and the proposed amount — except for non-commercial importations and claims of USD 1,000 or less.

For the security filing, CBP’s ISF FAQ 2.0 (11 May 2023) states liquidated damages of USD 5,000 per late ISF, per inaccurate ISF, and for the first inaccurate update. The amount sits in the bond terms at 19 CFR 113.62(j) and 113.63(g); the limitation period is six years under 28 U.S.C. § 2415.

EU penalties are not an EU number. UCC Article 42 requires each member state to provide penalties that are effective, proportionate and dissuasive — a pecuniary charge, or suspension, revocation or amendment of an authorisation. The Commission’s report on customs penalties (COM(2023) 5 final, 6 January 2023) finds the regimes national, not harmonised, so the amount depends on where the goods enter.

How I checked this

Everything above was fetched on 11 Oct 2026. China’s rules were read in Chinese, from the gazette texts of Orders 277, 270, 255, 254 and 416 and the Ministry of Commerce free trade area site; the US rules from the eCFR (current to 7 October 2026) and the 2024 US Code; the EU rules from EUR-Lex.

I measured search demand that day through the autocomplete endpoint, on “customs clearance documents required”, ”… example”, ”… pdf” and the bare phrase. Of ten completions for the bare phrase, nine are generic how-to strings and one names a fast-fashion retailer: part of this demand is shoppers reading a parcel-tracking page, not exporters.

No freight forwarder’s checklist was consulted.

What I could not check

GSP certificates in practice. Order 270 covers GSP certificates, but I could not verify which countries still accept a Chinese one: no donor list on a customs authority’s own site (re-tried 11 Oct 2026).
Order 199’s currency. I read the 2011 text as the operative China–ASEAN rule, but found no amendment list on the pages I used.
Duty rates. Nothing above states a rate; those live in TARIC and the HTS, and I recorded none.
A worked invoice example. No official page I found carries a sample compliant invoice; 19 CFR 141.86 enumerates content only.
The ISF enforcement split. Per late, per inaccurate and per first update comes from CBP’s 2009 mitigation guidelines as reprinted in the May 2023 FAQ; I found no later revision.
Penalty amounts outside the US. EU amounts are national by design; China’s figure covers origin certificates, not every documentary error.
Filing in practice. I have not logged into ACE, ICS2, the single window or a national system; nothing here is tested live.
The English text of the Form E procedures. English editions of that annex return 404, so box numbers and wording come from the Chinese text; Chinese titles and article numbers are my rendering.

How to buy a China high-speed rail ticket on a passport

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A foreign passport buys a Chinese train ticket. Since 28 November 2023 the identity check can also be done online rather than at a station window (China Railway Group, 2023-11-30). Two things decide how smooth the trip is: your account’s verification status, and the lane you walk into. A passport is not among the documents that open the automatic gates (real-name ticketing FAQ, read 2026-10-11).

Can you buy it yourself?

Yes. What changes by channel is which document the railway accepts there.

Where you buy	Foreigner-acceptable documents	Source
12306 website, 12306 app, ticket hotline	foreign passport; foreign permanent-resident ID	regulations, art. 11
Station ticket counter, ticket agency, or on board	foreign passport, foreign permanent-resident ID, foreigner’s exit-entry permit, seaman’s book, visa-application receipt, passport-loss report, embassy-issued temporary travel document	regulations, art. 11; order no. 39, art. 12
Self-service ticket machine in a station	foreign permanent-resident ID only	regulations, art. 11; order no. 39, art. 13

Both lists are in the current regulations, in force 2026-06-01, and in the transport ministry’s real-name ticketing order, in force 2023-01-01 (regulations; gazette, read 2026-10-11).

The English site, www.12306.cn/en, accepts only valid foreign passports; other documents mean the Chinese version (English FAQ, q9, read 2026-10-11). Registration there asks for nationality, name, passport number and expiry, date of birth, gender, username, password and an email address — no phone number (registration page, read 2026-10-11). An email-registered account must be activated through it within 24 hours, against 15 minutes for a mainland mobile number, and an account that fails activation cannot buy tickets (MTR FAQ, read 2026-10-11). And buy from 12306 itself: it calls itself the only official online channel, has never authorised a third party to sell or handle tickets, and says the payee should be China Railway Network Co. (announcement, 2024-12-11).

Verify the passport once, then buy

The announcement of 28 November 2023 gives three routes (China Railway Group, 2023-11-30): give 12306 your name, nationality and document number for an automatic check; upload a photo of the passport data page for manual review; or use a station counter.

Until the status clears, nothing can be bought online. 12306 lists three states — 已通过 (verified), 待核验 (in the process), 未通过 (checked and failed) — and says the last two cannot buy tickets (verification and name rules, read 2026-10-11). The English site shows “verified” and “ready to be verified” (English FAQ, q5).

Names follow 12306’s rules for foreign passports: Latin letters only; one space between name groups; up to 64 characters, anything past 64 not entered; for hyphens, apostrophes and commas follow the machine-readable zone, where < and << become spaces; drop Mr or Miss; leave out a bracketed second name (entry rules, updated 2026-07-01; registration rules, read 2026-10-11). A name cannot be changed after purchase: for a wrong name or number the instruction is to refund and buy again, paying the refund fee (ticketing FAQ, q10–11, read 2026-10-11).

The clock: 15 days, station by station

Tickets go on sale 15 days ahead including the day of travel, and each station has its own release time (People’s Daily, 2025-01-13); the railway’s platform notice says the same (12306, 2024-12-11). The release-time query warns its results are for reference, because stations can move both the release and the stop-sale times (release times, read 2026-10-11).

Service	Hours	Source
Online sales and changes	05:00 to 01:00; 05:00 to 23:30 on Tuesdays	English FAQ, q8
Refunds	round the clock	MTR FAQ

One document buys one ticket for the same date and train, except overnight high-speed sleepers; three cancelled orders in a day end online buying for that day (ticketing FAQ, q5–q6, read 2026-10-11). Online payment takes Chinese or foreign bank cards and mobile payment apps; a counter also takes cash (MOFCOM guide, 2025 edition, read 2026-10-11).

At the station: which lane

The self-service lanes read Chinese resident IDs, the Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan residence permits, the foreign permanent-resident ID, and the two mainland travel permits. Everyone else boards through the staffed channel with the original document (real-name FAQ; boarding FAQ, read 2026-10-11). Stations must keep a staffed lane for documents that cannot be read automatically (order no. 39, art. 18).

No paper ticket is needed on most routes: the electronic record is the contract, and the itinerary sheet is not a boarding voucher (regulations, art. 13, in force 2026-06-01; English FAQ, q10–11). One 12306 page read the same day disagrees, still listing a purchase made with any document other than a Chinese resident ID among the cases needing a paper ticket before boarding (ticket exchange FAQ, read 2026-10-11).

When a train is sold out, the official queue is the waitlist (候补), a Chinese-version feature open only to accounts that passed in-app facial verification or hold an activated frequent-traveller membership (MTR FAQ, read 2026-10-11). One account may hold six pending orders, three dates and up to 60 train-and-date combinations (People’s Daily, 2025-01-13).

Change and refund: the two tables

Refund fee, counting back from departure:

Time before departure	Fee
8 days or more	none
48 hours to under 8 days	5% of the fare
24 to under 48 hours	10%
under 24 hours	20%

Change fee, by when you change and which date you move to:

When you change	Moving to	Fee
48 hours or more before departure	any train in the presale window	none
under 48 hours before departure	the same date or earlier	none
24 to 48 hours before departure	a later date	5% of the lower of the two fares
under 24 hours before departure	a later date	15% of the lower fare
after departure, before 24:00 that day	another train that day	none
after departure, before 24:00 that day	the next day or later	40% of the lower fare

Refund tiers: purchase notes, 2023-11-14 and English FAQ, q11, read 2026-10-11. Change tiers: announcement of 2024-01-11, in force 2024-01-15 and regulations, art. 28, in force 2026-06-01.

Four details:

The refund fee has a 2 yuan floor and rounds to the nearest half yuan, 0.25 down and 0.75 up (English FAQ, q11).
One change per ticket; nothing is refunded once the train has left the ticket’s origin station, including a ticket changed after departure (regulations, arts. 28 and 46).
Online change and refund close 25 minutes before departure at the ticket’s departure station; inside that window it is a counter job, and cash tickets are counter-only either way (change and refund FAQ; regulations, arts. 29 and 47, read 2026-10-11).
Change to a train 8 or more days away, then refund it more than 8 days before departure, and 5% is still charged; a changed ticket travelling in the Spring Festival period moves to the under-24-hours rate (purchase notes, 2023-11-14).

When things go wrong

Missed it. Free change to another train that day until 24:00; a ticket changed after departure cannot be refunded (arts. 28, 46).

Late train. Refund at the departure station before the train actually leaves and the full fare returns, no fee (art. 51).

Wrong train, or off at the wrong stop. Tell staff: the conductor writes a transport record and the station puts you on the nearest train back to your ticket’s arrival station or origin, free; since 2026-06-01, with your agreement, that can be a same-city station instead. Nothing happens once you leave the station, and riding on to your original destination means paying the difference when that fare is higher and getting nothing back when it is lower (art. 37).

Past your stop. Ask the conductor before the ticket’s arrival station. With capacity the railway sells you the extra section; without it the conductor may require you to get off (art. 34).

Lost passport. The regulations send you to the document’s issuing authority for a temporary certificate. Lost on the train or before exit, buy a replacement ticket, then reclaim within 30 days with that certificate and the new ticket (art. 39). The app-based electronic temporary travel ID is issued against a Chinese resident ID; the paper version comes from the station’s public-security office (real-name FAQ, q4).

What the ticket costs, and why one section has several prices

Seat classes are named in the regulations: 二等座 second class, 一等座 first class, 特等座 premium, 商务座 business (art. 3). Each journey has a published fare (公布票价), the cap, and an executed fare (执行票价), what you pay; later adjustments are neither charged nor refunded on tickets already sold (art. 8, in force 2026-06-01). High-speed fares are not in the central price catalogue, whose rail entry is hard-seat and hard-sleeper fares on centrally managed lines, and whose note excludes 动车组列车 (NDRC order 31, in force 2020-05-01).

One operator published its whole fare table when it moved to flexible pricing. One line, one direction:

Section	Second	First	Premium	Business
Beijing South–Shanghai Hongqiao	662	1,060	1,192	2,318
Beijing South–Jinan West	223	357	402	782
Shanghai Hongqiao–Nanjing South	162	260	292	568
Beijing South–Tianjin South	67	107	121	235
Shanghai Hongqiao–Suzhou North	45	71	80	156

Published fares, Beijing–Shanghai High-Speed Railway, 2020-10-24, in force 2020-12-23. No class ratios are printed, so I measured them off the table: across 276 station pairs the medians are 1.6 for first class, 1.8 for premium and 3.5 for business (my arithmetic). The same announcement caps the line at 9.04折 and floors it at 7.52折 of the published fare — for the full 662 yuan run, 598 and 498 yuan.

Four more sections took the same pricing on 2024-06-15: published fares up about 19–20%, cheapest tickets at 5.5折 of the published fare, 34% below the old flat price (China Railway Group, 2024-06-01). The operator gave reporters two examples:

Section	Cheapest second class	Undiscounted second class	Old price
Wuhan–Guangzhou South	304	553	463.5
Shanghai Hongqiao–Changsha South	315	not stated	not stated

Sources: People’s Daily interview with the operating companies, 2024-05-07; Xinhua interview with the railway’s passenger department, 2024-06-01. The first pair is the railway’s own illustration: two trains there both cost 463.5 yuan before the change, taking 3 hours 47 minutes and 4 hours 50 minutes; afterwards the faster costs 553 yuan, 19% more, the slower 304 yuan, 34% less — 249 yuan apart. Both floors are 5.5折 of the published fare by construction: 304 ÷ 0.55 = 552.7 and 315 ÷ 0.55 = 572.7, so the second section’s published fare is about 573 yuan (my arithmetic). Floors are set per period: for the 2026 Spring Festival the deepest discount on 动车组 trains was described as 2折, a fifth of the reference fare (CCTV via Xinhua, 2026-01-31).

How I checked this

Primary sources only: the railway’s passenger transport regulations as published on 12306, in the version in force since 2026-06-01 rather than the one most travel writing still quotes; 12306’s FAQ pages and its purchase notes of 2023-11-14; four 12306 announcements (2019-07-26, 2020-10-24, 2024-01-11, 2024-12-11); the 2020 Beijing–Shanghai fare table; the central price catalogue and the transport ministry’s order in the State Council gazette; the 2025 MOFCOM guide; and the cross-border operator’s FAQ. Three state-media items carry numbers absent from the railway’s own pages — the 15-day presale, the 304 and 315 yuan floors, and the Spring Festival discount depth — so each is named where it appears. All pages were read on 2026-10-11.

Paper reimbursement receipts were replaced by railway electronic invoices from 2025-10-01, a change the 2026 rules absorb; some older 12306 pages still describe the paper receipt (Science and Technology Daily, 2026-05-29, read 2026-10-11).

What I could not check

Whether a particular station’s gate reads a passport. 12306’s lists put passports in the staffed channel; I cannot test a gate.
The turnaround for an uploaded passport photo. Not stated.
The payment deadline. A state-media report in January 2026 says 30 minutes; 12306 gives no length.
The service fee at a ticket agency. A 5 yuan figure circulates in guides; no current rate card found.
Whether a station’s public-security office issues a temporary travel ID to a foreign passport holder with an embassy letter rather than sending them to the issuing authority.
Whether a verified foreign-passport account can pass the in-app facial check the cross-border operator ties to waitlist tickets.
Whether an issued electronic invoice blocks an online refund or change. The old trigger was a printed receipt; the 2026 rules name no replacement.
Which paper-ticket rule your station follows. Two 12306 pages read the same day disagree.

Paying in China as a foreigner: what works, what it costs

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A Shanghai government page, updated 2026-07-24, puts the limit for a foreign card linked to Alipay or Weixin Pay at up to 5,000 US dollars per transaction and 50,000 dollars a year (english.shanghai.gov.cn, updated 2026-07-24).

Alipay’s own guide sheet says 3,000 yuan per transaction, 50,000 a month and 60,000 a year (Alipay guide sheet, PDF, no printed date; its file metadata says 2024-03-05, read 2026-10-11).

Weixin Pay’s live help page says 6,500 yuan, 50,000 and 65,000 (WeChat Help Center, read 2026-10-11).

American Express’s own Alipay FAQ, February 2025, tells cardholders the Alipay wallet allows 5,000 dollars per transaction and 50,000 a year, and asks for passport verification once annual transactions pass 2,000 dollars (Amex Alipay FAQ, PDF, February 2025).

The dollar figures are the ceiling regulators set in March 2024; the yuan figures are what the apps print. On 2026-10-11 no page from either company reconciled them. Every figure below was read that day; all of them move.

Where a linked foreign card works

Shops, restaurants, convenience stores. Scan the merchant’s code, or show your own. Alipay’s mainland consumer page claims tens of millions of merchants with an “except for special occasions” caveat it does not define (Alipay+, read 2026-10-11). Weixin Pay’s own guide is blunter: not every merchant can process an international card, paying an overseas merchant is not supported, and a greyed-out card at checkout means that merchant cannot take it (Weixin Pay user guide, PDF, metadata 2023-09-25, read 2026-10-11).

The metro. Beijing’s visitor page lists Alipay’s Metro QR code as a way to ride, and gives the tap-to-ride card rules: gates take UnionPay QuickPass and overseas-issued Visa and Mastercard, overseas-issued JCB is “to be supported”, and it lists domestic-issued cards — foreign-currency, dual-currency and single-brand Amex among them — as unsupported (english.beijing.gov.cn, 2025-12-29). Shanghai’s page says its gates take UnionPay, Visa, Mastercard, American Express and JCB, that the metro works inside Alipay and WeChat or the Metro Daduhui app, and that metro service centres sell tickets on overseas cards (english.shanghai.gov.cn, 2026-08-13). Two cities, two card lists. Check the city.

Taxis. Some Shanghai taxis with a compatible POS terminal take foreign cards (english.shanghai.gov.cn, 2026-09-21).

What a linked card cannot do. Weixin Pay’s guide: an international card cannot send red packets, transfer money, top up the balance, or buy wealth products, and those need a mainland-bank debit card (Weixin Pay user guide, PDF). The live help page compresses that to “red packets and money transfers” (WeChat Help Center, read 2026-10-11). Alipay’s live page adds insurance (Alipay+, read 2026-10-11).

Setting it up

Both platforms follow the same shape; these steps are theirs.

Register with any phone number that receives SMS. A mainland number is not required (WeChat Help Center, read 2026-10-11).
Alipay: Me > Bank Cards > Add card (Alipay guide sheet, PDF). Weixin Pay: Me > Pay and Services > Wallet, then Bank Cards > Add a Bank Card (WeChat Help Center). If that entry point is missing, two activation routes: scan its QR code, or Me > Settings > General > Auxiliary Functions > Enable Weixin Pay (PDF, 2023-09-25).
Enter your identity details and upload a passport copy when asked. The cardholder must do this in person (same PDF).
Set the six-digit payment password. Every transaction asks for it, and it is not your bank PIN (same PDF).
Pay by scanning, or by showing your code (national guide, PDF, 2026-07-07).

Two traps are documented. The card name must match the name registered on the account (english.shanghai.gov.cn, 2023-12-15, which still prints the superseded 1,000 and 10,000 dollar limits). Some users land in WeChat Pay HK or Malaysia instead: the guide says tap Me > Services > the three dots > Select Wallet Region > China Mainland, and notes the mainland wallet shows the yen sign (PDF, 2023-09-25). Weixin Pay also caps international cards at three per account (same PDF).

Fees and limits

All figures read on 2026-10-11. Card networks come from the national guide published 2026-07-07 (PDF).

Item	Alipay	Weixin Pay	Government page
Networks listed	UnionPay, Visa, Mastercard, JCB, Diners, Discover	UnionPay, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, JCB, Diners, Discover	POS lists both, 2026-09-21
Single transaction	3,000 yuan	6,500 yuan	up to 5,000 US dollars
Monthly cumulative	50,000 yuan	50,000 yuan	not stated
Annual cumulative	60,000 yuan	65,000 yuan	up to 50,000 US dollars
Fee at or under 200 yuan	none	none	generally exempt
Fee above 200 yuan	3 percent	3 percent	3 percent of the full amount
Source read date	guide sheet, no printed date	help page, live	2026-07-24, 2026-09-21

The 3 percent applies to the whole amount, not the excess. A 300-yuan meal costs 309 yuan on a foreign card (my arithmetic).

The government’s wording is “up to”. Shanghai’s page says the limits are set by regulators at a maximum of 5,000 dollars per transaction and 50,000 a year, and adds: check the app for your account’s limits (english.shanghai.gov.cn, 2026-07-24).

Travel Wallet, if you would rather not link a card. Alipay launched it on 2026-04-28, first on Beijing’s inbound-visitor platform: no card binding, funded by cross-border remittance, no transaction fee on mainland spending, open to visitors from 40 countries and regions, Beijing first (CNR, 2026-04-29; Mobile Payment Network, 2026-04-29). A partner integration document puts its single-transaction and annual limits both at 15,000 yuan, ages 15 to 75, passport holders only (xCurrency docs, read 2026-10-11). No Alipay page describes it, so treat that as reported.

Tour Card. The national guide of 2026-07-07 describes it as a prepaid card you apply for and top up inside the UnionPay app (PDF). Tencent’s 2024 announcement said to apply for and link it through Weixin Pay (Tencent, 2024-04-12). The route moved.

What changed, and when

2024-03-01 and 2024-04-12. The central bank said it would guide the major platforms to raise the single-transaction limit for visitors from 1,000 to 5,000 dollars and the annual cap from 10,000 to 50,000 (gov.cn English, 2024-03-01); Tencent then said passport verification was what unlocked those figures, and that card linking had been simplified (Tencent, 2024-04-12).
2025-02-25. American Express cards became linkable to Alipay, a Shanghai visitor page reported, extending the service to seven brands (english.shanghai.gov.cn, 2025-02-28); Amex’s own February 2025 FAQ agrees (PDF). The national guide of 2026-07-07 lists Amex only for Weixin Pay, so the official pages disagree on that brand and both stand.
2025-05-28. A Weixin Pay campaign waived the 3 percent fee for first-time linkers on daily transactions under 1,000 yuan for 60 consecutive days, capped at 30 yuan saved per transaction; the same announcement states the sub-200-yuan exemption for all international card users (Beijing foreign affairs office, 2025-05-28).
2026-04-28. Travel Wallet launched in Beijing.
2026-05-27. Tencent announced a 90-day fee waiver for first-time linkers on daily spending up to 1,000 yuan, PayPal QR payments starting with US users, and guidance in 16 languages (Tencent, 2026-05-27).
2026-07-07. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs published an updated Guide to Payment Services in China in English (embassy notice, 2026-07-03).
Weixin Pay’s own numbers moved. Its printed guide shows 6,000 and 60,000 yuan; the live help page shows 6,500 and 65,000. Both are the company’s words, one dated September 2023 by file metadata, one read live today.

Why a payment fails

The failure reasons the platforms’ documents list, in the order I would check them (Weixin Pay user guide, PDF, 2023-09-25).

The card is not enabled for overseas or online use. A bank-side decline surfaces in the app; Weixin Pay is not responsible for it.
The name does not match. Card name against account name, checked at linking and again at payment (Shanghai, 2023-12-15).
The merchant is not enabled. A greyed-out card means that merchant cannot take an international card.
The amount is over your platform limit. 3,000 yuan on Alipay is easy to hit on one hotel night (Alipay guide sheet, PDF).
The card state. Expired, locked, reported lost or short of funds all fail at add-card time.
SMS never arrives. Roaming off, the area code defaulting to +86, or a security app blocking it.
You are in the wrong wallet region. Hong Kong or Malaysia wallet instead of mainland.
Facial verification fails. The guide offers a retry, then “Other methods”: upload a photo of yourself holding your passport data page and wait for review.

How I checked these numbers

Read dates are on every figure. Data checked 2026-10-11. Where a document has no printed date I checked its PDF metadata and said so.

Platform sources: Weixin Pay’s live English help page, its own user guide PDF, and Alipay’s printed guide sheet. Alipay’s consumer help pages would not render outside the app, so its yuan figures come from a sheet hosted on a conference site rather than an Alipay domain. This is the weakness in this post.
Government sources: the 2026-07-07 national guide, three Shanghai pages, one Beijing page, and the March 2024 central-bank briefing. Company and issuer sources: Tencent’s newsroom and Amex’s Alipay FAQ, read directly rather than through a news rewrite.
What I could not make agree: the dollar ceiling against the yuan caps, and the two Amex lists. Where a rule is stated on both a government page and a company page, I kept both rather than picking one.

What I could not check

A live Alipay page with the yuan limits. The 3,000 / 50,000 / 60,000 figures come from Alipay’s own guide sheet: no printed date, third-party host, and no live Alipay page stating them that I could load, so I cannot date them. Two other carriers print the same three numbers — Alipay’s infographic (mirror, metadata 2024-07-03) and a third-party help centre (MP help centre, 2026-08-13) — but neither is Alipay’s live site.
How verification maps to a limit. Tencent says verified users get “up to” 5,000 and 50,000 dollars; Amex says verification triggers above 2,000 dollars of annual transactions and raises the limit to those figures; Alipay’s sheet states one flat set of yuan caps per account. Nothing explains how identity level and currency convert. I have no tested account and will not guess.
The daily limit. One secondary guide prints a 10,000-yuan daily cap for Alipay beside the same three limits (ingstart, updated 2026-07-07), and its Weixin Pay column contradicts the platform’s own help page. No first-party page for a daily cap, so it is not in the table.
Whether the sub-200-yuan exemption has an end date. Three sources state it as a standing rule for all international card users with no expiry: Weixin Pay’s live help page, its 2023 user guide, and the Beijing announcement that separates it from the campaign beside it. I read it as standing, but I cannot prove a negative from a page that omits one.
Travel Wallet’s rules. Launched 2026-04-28; I have launch reporting and a partner integration document, no Alipay page. Limits, scenarios and the 40-country list are single-sourced.
Card brands that fail in practice. Prepaid and virtual cards are widely reported as rejected at linking. No first-party statement lists them, so they are absent above.
Anything about my own city. Deliberately absent. Cities appear only where a government page about them is the source, and neither is where I live.

Provincial GDP summed against the national figure

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

China publishes GDP twice over. The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) puts out one national number, and each of 31 provincial-level units publishes its own regional figure. Add the 31 up and you get a different total.

For 2024 my sum of the provincial figures is 134.03 trillion yuan. The national preliminary figure for that year was 134.91 trillion (NBS, 2025-01-17). The gap is −0.65%. Eight years earlier the same exercise ran the other way: the provincial figures for 2016 added to 78.01 trillion against a national 74.41 trillion, +4.83%.

The sign flips at 2019, the first year accounted under the unified regional accounting system. Everything here comes from NBS publications: the yearbook’s regional tables, the annual GDP communiqués, the verification announcements, and three NBS explainers.

Every number below is one fixed vintage, read on 2026-10-11 (China Standard Time), and all of them move.

The year-by-year table

Amounts in trillion yuan, current prices. “Sum” is my addition of the 31 provincial values printed in the yearbook edition that carries that year.

Year	Sum of 31 provinces	National, preliminary	National, latest revision	Sum − preliminary	Sum − latest revision
2015	72.28	67.67	68.91	+4.61 (+6.81%)	+3.37 (+4.89%)
2016	78.01	74.41	74.36	+3.60 (+4.83%)	+3.65 (+4.90%)
2017	84.71	82.71	82.08	+2.00 (+2.42%)	+2.63 (+3.21%)
2018	91.47	90.03	91.93	+1.44 (+1.60%)	−0.46 (−0.50%)
2019	98.53	99.09	98.65	−0.56 (−0.56%)	−0.12 (−0.12%)
2020	101.24	101.60	101.36	−0.36 (−0.35%)	−0.12 (−0.12%)
2021	113.77	114.37	114.92	−0.60 (−0.52%)	−1.15 (−1.00%)
2022	120.35	121.02	120.47	−0.67 (−0.56%)	−0.12 (−0.10%)
2023	125.09	126.06	129.43	−0.97 (−0.77%)	−4.34 (−3.35%)
2024	134.03	134.91	134.81	−0.88 (−0.65%)	−0.78 (−0.58%)

The provincial sums come from the yearbook’s regional GDP table, one edition per year. All retrieved 2026-10-11.

Year	Yearbook edition	Regional table
2024	2025	table 3-9
2023	2024	table 3-9
2022	2023	table 3-9
2021	2022	table 3-9
2020	2021	table 3-9
2019	2020	table 3-9
2018	2019	table 3-9
2017	2018	table 3-9
2016	2017	table 3-9
2015	2016	table 3-11

Each table prints its own title line with the data year, which is how the edition-to-year match was checked: the 2025 edition, for instance, is headed “3-9 地区生产总值 (2024年)”. The 2015 table carries a different number and a different column layout, the only break in the series.

The national figures, with the date each was published:

Year	Preliminary	Published	Latest revision	Published
2015	67.67	2016-02-29	68.91	2017-01-09
2016	74.41	2017-02-28	74.36	2018-01-05
2017	82.71	2018-02-28	82.08	2019-01-18
2018	90.03	2019-02-28	91.93	2019-11-22
2019	99.09	2020-02-28	98.65	2020-12-30
2020	101.60	2021-02-28	101.36	2021-12-17
2021	114.37	2022-02-28	114.92	2022-12-27
2022	121.02	2023-02-28	120.47	2023-12-29
2023	126.06	2024-02-29	129.43	2024-12-27
2024	134.91	2025-01-17	134.81	2025-12-26

Each preliminary figure is the one printed in that year’s annual communiqué, dated as shown; for 2024 I used the January release. The 2020 and 2021 verification announcements also print both numbers side by side. The 2018 and 2023 revisions are economic-census revisions rather than the routine final verification.

Three things the table shows.

From 2015 to 2018 the provincial sum sat above the national figure every year, by 6.81%, 4.83%, 2.42% and 1.60%. The gap shrank year by year.

From 2019 the sum sits below the national figure, and the gap is small: −0.35% to −0.77% across the six years. Against the later revisions the same rows run from −0.10% to −1.00%, with one outlier at −3.35%. That outlier is 2023, and the explanation is mechanical: the fifth economic census, announced on 2024-12-27, revised the national figure upward only. The provincial sums for 2023 come from the edition published before it.

For 2025 there is no provincial table yet: the yearbook index lists 2025 as the newest edition (NBS yearbook index, retrieved 2026-10-11), so no 2025 sum can be computed. The national preliminary figure is 140.19 trillion yuan (2025 communiqué, NBS, 2026-02-28).

Why the totals differ, in the bureau’s own words

Before 2019, each level accounted for itself. The NBS calls the old system graded accounting: the national bureau computed national GDP, and each provincial bureau computed its own regional figure. The yearbook chapter note of that era says the regional data came from provincial bureaux and that, in the original, “由于采取分级核算，各地区数据相加不等于全国总计” — because the accounting was graded, the regional figures did not add to the national total (China Statistical Yearbook 2019, chapter 3 note, retrieved 2026-10-11). An NBS explainer gives the reasons it attributes to that gap: incomplete basic data, non-standard accounting methods, and interference from performance assessment (NBS, 什么是三大核算改革, page dated 2024-12-17). The bureau’s own interview on the reform states the outcome: the regional sum “长期高于国内生产总值”, long sat above national GDP (NBS interview, 2019-12-27).

After 2019, one body does the accounting, and the expected sign is negative. Regional GDP is now led, organised and implemented by the NBS with provincial bureaux participating, and provinces no longer submit their own GDP totals (NBS, 地区生产总值统一核算如何实施, page dated 2024-12-18). The current yearbook note states the consequence: “由于部分活动仅核算在全国、不核算在地区，各地区数据相加之和略小于全国” — because some activity is accounted only nationally and not by region, the regional sum comes out slightly smaller than the national total (China Statistical Yearbook 2025, chapter 3 note, retrieved 2026-10-11).

The bureau names what is not split by region. The same explainer lists what stays in the national accounts only: embassies and consulates abroad, confidential units that cannot sensibly be divided by region, headquarters-economy activity, and the armed forces and armed police (NBS, 地区生产总值核算方法, 2024-12-30).

Where regional data are thin, the national number is split, and any residual is spread. Two mechanisms sit in the same explainer. Industries with no regional source data are not accounted regionally; the national figure is divided among provinces using related indicators. Where the summed regional value added still differs from the national figure, the difference is allocated across provinces in proportion to their share of that industry, so the two line up. In the original: “利用地区行业增加值占比分摊差额，实现地区汇总数与国家数基本衔接”.

The national number is provisional twice. Annual GDP is accounted twice: a preliminary figure completed before 20 January, then a final verification built on the bureau’s annual reports, the Finance Ministry’s final accounts and departmental financial returns. The annex to the 2024 announcement sets the deadline at the January of the year after next, and the 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2024 verifications all came out in the following December (中国GDP年度核算说明, annex to NBS, 2025-12-26). Each routine verification prints its own change, from −636.7 billion yuan (2017) to +556.7 billion (2021). The 2015 entry, +354.6 billion, is measured against a preliminary already restated by the 2016 research-and-development revision, not against the 67.67 trillion the communiqué first printed. Censuses then rewrite the whole back series.

Who changed the accounting, and when

The dated record, from the bureau’s documents:

Date	What changed	Source
2016	Research and development spending reclassified as gross fixed capital formation; the 1952–2015 series revised	Yearbook 2017, chapter 3 note
2017-06-26	The Central Leading Group for Comprehensively Deepening Reform approved the plan for unified regional accounting	NBS explainer
2017-07-30	The Party and State Council general offices issued the plan, scheduling the reform for the 2019 annual data	NBS explainer
2019-11-11	NBS mobilisation meeting for the unified accounting reform	NBS interview, 2019-12-27
2019-11-22	Fourth national economic census: 2018 national GDP revised up by 189.72 billion yuan (2.1%) to 91.93 trillion	NBS announcement
2020-01	Unified accounting begins: the bureau puts the first quarterly round in January 2020 for 2019 and the first annual round in November 2020	NBS explainer
2024-12-27	Fifth national economic census: 2023 national GDP revised up by 336.90 billion yuan (2.7%) to 129.43 trillion, of which 202.57 billion (1.6%) from the census and 134.33 billion (1.1%) from a change in how owner-occupied housing services are accounted	NBS announcement

One year, three official numbers

The revision machinery leaves one year carrying several official values at once. 2019 is the clean example: a later census revised it again.

Year	Preliminary	Final verification	Yearbook 2025 series
2019	99.09	98.65	100.59
2023	126.06	129.43	129.43
2024	134.91	134.81	134.91

The third column is the national series in China Statistical Yearbook 2025, table 3-1, retrieved 2026-10-11; its chapter note records that the fifth economic census triggered a revision of the historical series. Its GDP column reads 100.5872, 129.4272 and 134.9084 trillion yuan for those three years. For 2023 the yearbook agrees with the census revision. For 2019 it sits 2.0% above the final verification. For 2024 it still shows the preliminary figure, because the yearbook’s last year is not final yet.

Pair a provincial sum from one vintage with a national figure from another and the gap belongs to the comparison rather than to the economy.

Method

Unit. Source documents are in 亿元 (100 million yuan) at current prices. I converted to trillion yuan and rounded to two decimals. The gaps printed in the table are those subtracted columns; the percentages are my arithmetic on the unrounded sums, which is why a printed gap sometimes rounds to a different hundredth than its own percentage would give.
Coverage. Each regional table has 31 data rows, one per provincial-level unit; the 2024 verification’s annex says the national series excludes Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan (2024 verification announcement, annex 2, 2025-12-26).
Vintage. Each provincial sum is the one printed in the yearbook edition published the following year. It is compared with the preliminary figure published in January or February after the year, and with the later verification or census revision. The current revised series appears only in the three-row table above, where that difference is the point.
Two independent reads. The regional tables are images, so each year’s first numeric column was read twice: once by a tesseract OCR pass (Chinese plus English, word boxes, the first numeric column isolated by its x-band) and once by a separate vision pass over the same image. That is 310 cells over ten years. The two passes agree on 268 of the 279 cells they both returned. Ten of the 11 differences are the OCR pass scanning one number wrong: a dropped decimal point (上海 2015 as 2512345 for 25123.45; 江苏 2019 as 9963152 for 99631.52), a dropped leading digit (新疆 2022 as 1741.3 for 17741.3), or a truncated decimal. The 2020 edition’s first column escaped the band rule, so that year rests on the vision read alone. The eleventh difference went the other way: the vision pass gave 16695.0 for 天津 2021, where the OCR pass and a re-read of a cropped band both gave 15695.0, the value used here. Recomputing the sums from each pass gives the same total in every year where both produced a first-column read.
What I left alone. From the 2018 edition onward the table carries a footnote: the 2018 edition’s table (2017 data) says its figures were revised using the third national agricultural census, and the editions for 2018 to 2024 data say “表中数据为初步核算数” (preliminary accounting numbers). The 2016 and 2017 editions carry none. I adjusted nothing; the sums are as printed.
Retrieval. All reads on 2026-10-11, China Standard Time. The national portal data.stats.gov.cn refused my requests with HTTP 403, so the yearbook tables are my route to the same series.

When these figures change

The dates matter on an annually refreshed page; the date above is when every figure here was read.

Figure	When it appears
National preliminary	January or February of the following year
National final verification	December of the following year in the recent record; the rule allows until January of the year after next
Provincial tables	With the yearbook edition published in the following year, which is when a year’s provincial sum can first be computed
Census revision	In place, and it rewrites the national back series (2019 for 2018, 2024 for 2023)

What I could not check

The 2026 yearbook. The index lists 2025 as the newest edition, so there is no 2025 provincial sum.
The size of each mechanism. The bureau documents that some activity stays national only, and that residuals are allocated, and publishes no amount for either, so I cannot split the 0.35%–0.77% post-2019 gap.
Cross-province activity. The only related item in the sources I read is headquarters-economy activity being accounted nationally. Whether provinces also count the same value added twice is not addressed in any document I reached.
The post-census provincial figures for 2023. If provinces republished their 2023 figures after the fifth census revision, their sum would sit closer to 129.43 trillion. Each edition carries one year of regional data, and I did not collect later provincial figures.
Whether the 2024 provincial sum is final. The table’s footnote calls its figures preliminary and no verified regional series is published, so it can still move.
The 2015 restatement. The verification’s baseline works out to 68.55 trillion (689,052 minus 3,546); no document I read states that restatement directly.
Which accounting round came first. One NBS explainer says the bureau ran the 2019 full-year unified accounting in January 2020 as the first formal implementation, and the same page says January 2020 was the first quarterly round and November 2020 the first annual one. Both sentences are on one live page, and I cannot reconcile them.
Provincial figures as first published. I did not collect 31 provincial communiqués for ten years, so I do not know how far the yearbook values differ from what each province first printed.
Footnotes on the 2015 and 2016 regional tables. I found none, and cannot say whether that is because there were none.
A printed total to check my sums against. The regional tables carry no national row, so my only check on the sums is the agreement of the two reads.

How renting works in China, from listing to deposit

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A national rental regulation took effect on 15 September 2025 (State Council Order No. 812, signed 2025-07-16, published 2025-07-21). It covers three things a new tenant meets in the first week: the deposit, the broker’s fee, and where a dispute can go.

Older layers sit under it: the Civil Code’s lease chapter, in force since 2021 (articles 703 to 734); the housing ministry’s rental rules, in force since 1 February 2011 (Order No. 6); and two circulars on rental companies and brokers (2021, 2021-04-15, and 2023, 2023-04-27). Cities publish rent levels by district and housing type (Order 812, art 29; 2011 rules, art 5).

Four channels, and who takes a fee

Channel	What you pay, and to whom	Who may hold your deposit and rent	The failure mode
Broker storefront	Commission to the agency, normally at signing	The landlord, not the broker	Fees that were never posted; a broker offering to pass your rent through its own account
Listing app or site with agents	The same agency commission, same rules	The landlord, not the platform	Bait listings; a poster who is not the owner
Rental company (leases the flat, then sublets it)	Rent, often plus a service fee	A supervised bank account the company has to publish, in cities that run the scheme	You prepay six or twelve months, the company stops paying the owner, you are asked to leave
Direct from an owner	Rent only, no commission	The owner, with no escrow protection	No title check by anyone, unregistered sublets, a deposit with no written return date

A broker must post its charges and may not add anything to the posted price (Order 812, art 26). Before payment it must give you a fee list, which you sign; bundled pricing is banned, and platforms may not force a uniform fee on the agencies on them (MoHURD and SAMR, 2023, 2023-04-27). An agency that does not finish what its service contract promised may not charge a commission, and two agencies on one deal may charge only one (brokerage rules, art 19, in force 2011-04-01).

No national rate exists: the 2023 circular says the parties negotiate, fees should come down, a dearer deal should carry a lower rate, and both sides should share the cost, and that is all of it. One municipality fixes a figure on its own territory: an agency’s commission is generally no more than one month’s rent, and nothing may be charged again when the same parties renew (municipal rental regulation, art 46, in force 2022-09-01; model contract, February 2023). City guidance, not a national cap. On the day, the rule to use is that neither a broker nor a listing platform may collect or pay rent or deposit for anyone (Order 812, arts 25 and 36).

What the lease has to contain

The 2011 rules list what a lease should cover (art 7); the 2025 model lease walks the same ground clause by clause (GF—2025—2614, April 2025).

Clause	Where it comes from	What to check
Parties and title	Order 812, art 9; model lease, arts 1 and 13	The owner shows ID and the title certificate; if a company is letting to you, ask to see its lease with the owner
Term, rent, payment cycle	Civil Code, arts 704 and 705	Start and end dates; the cycle; a residential lease is capped at 20 years, and anything beyond that is void
Deposit	Order 812, art 10	Amount, return date, and the cases where it may be deducted. All three must be written, and outside them the landlord may not deduct without a legitimate reason
Utilities and property fee	2011 rules, art 7(8); model lease, art 7	The model lease is a tick list: water, electricity, gas, heating, property fee, waste, internet, parking. Anything not ticked was not agreed
Repairs	Civil Code, arts 712 and 713	The landlord repairs unless you agreed otherwise; if they refuse, you may repair and bill them, or take a rent cut or a longer term
Subletting	Civil Code, arts 716 and 718	Written consent needed; an owner who knows about a sublet and says nothing for six months is treated as consenting
Early exit	Model lease, art 15	The notice period and the penalty, both left as blanks. Whatever figure goes in the blank is the one that applies
Disputes	Order 812, art 35; model lease, art 19	Court or arbitration is named in the text, and that is the last step rather than the first
Filing	Order 812, art 8	Filing is the owner’s duty and free; if they will not file, you may file it yourself
Space that may be let	Order 812, art 7; 2011 rules, art 8	A kitchen, bathroom, balcony, corridor, basement store or garage may not be let separately as living space, and the smallest unit is the original designed room

The model lease’s annex is worth the bother: a handover sheet listing every appliance, key and meter, with the reading at handover and the date each was paid to.

Deposits, rent cycles, and who holds the money

“押一付三” is one month’s deposit and three months’ rent; “押一付一” is one of each. Both are market habits, and no national rule I found sets either for a private landlord. The national rule attaches supervision to the sizes instead: a company collecting more than three months’ rent at once, or more than one month’s deposit, must route that money through a supervised account (2021 circular, section 3, 2021-04-15). Order 812 makes that account compulsory for companies that sublet (art 19); running it improperly costs 20,000 to 100,000 yuan, or 100,000 to 500,000 if unfixed (art 43). Every one of those figures is written for companies and platforms; one city’s housing centre says personal landlords are outside its scheme (policy Q&A, 2026-04-02). The mechanics are city-level, and they set the clock on your refund.

Where the rule sits	What it requires
One municipality’s escrow measures, issued 2024-07-29, in force 2024-10-01 (link)	The first three months’ rent reaches the company within a day, the rest one month at a time; after you hand back the flat the company has three working days to issue a written refund opinion with deductions itemised; you have three working days to accept or dispute; the balance earns interest at the central bank’s demand-deposit rate while it waits
Another city’s policy explainer, 2026-04-02 (link)	Deposit and any rent beyond three months are held; the explainer states that this is meant to make the three-month cycle the normal one
A city housing authority’s guidance, 2026-03-09 (link)	For a company tenancy: a rent cycle of no more than three months, a deposit of no more than one month, paid into the account the authority published

Pay by transfer so a record exists, and keep the receipt or invoice. Treat a rent loan as a debt: the 2021 circular makes it illegal for a company to induce a tenant into one or to dress it up as a rent discount (section 4, 2021-04-15), and one city’s regulation bans the same inducement (art 37, in force 2022-09-01). The older trick — paying a year up front to a company that pays the owner monthly — is what a city’s consumer warning of 2026-01-20 describes: read a price well below the market as its sign, pay by transfer, ask for a stamped receipt, and complain on 12345 (warning).

Filing the contract

Leases are signed under real names and filed by the owner through the local rental service platform; filing is free, and if the owner will not do it, you can (Order 812, art 8). The 30-day window and a penalty of up to 1,000 yuan for an individual come from the 2011 rules (arts 14 and 23), and failing to file does not make the lease invalid (Civil Code, art 706).

A lease of six months or more must be in writing; without writing it becomes open-ended, and either side may end it with reasonable notice (Civil Code, arts 707 and 730). A foreign tenant registers with the local police within 24 hours of moving in, personally or through the host, online or in person; failing to do it carries a warning and a fine of up to 2,000 yuan (immigration service explainer, 2026-09-21; Exit-Entry Administration Law, art 76). The larger range that circulates, 1,000 to 5,000 yuan, is the penalty on a hotel that fails to report a guest’s registration information.

Utilities and the property fee

The 2011 rules do not decide who pays for water, gas or the property fee; they require the lease to state it (art 7(8)), which is why the model lease hands you a tick list rather than a default (art 7, April 2025). The property fee is owed by the owner under the property service contract; if owner and occupier agree the occupier pays, that governs and the owner stays jointly liable (Property Management Regulation, art 41, Order No. 379 of 2003, third revision 2018-03-19). Water, power, gas, heating and telecom bill the end user, and a company collecting on their behalf may not add a handling fee (art 44).

The account is usually in the owner’s or the property company’s name, so read the meters with the owner into the handover sheet, and ask who holds the electricity card if the meter is prepaid.

Moving out, and the deposit

Ordinary wear from using a flat as agreed is not something you pay for (Civil Code, art 710); you hand the flat back in the state ordinary use would leave it (art 733); deductions are limited to the cases written in the lease (Order 812, art 10).

So the exit is paperwork: agree the date and the notice in writing, walk the flat with the handover sheet in hand, photograph the meters and every room, return the keys against a written receipt, and put an account number for the refund in writing. With a company in an escrow city the refund runs on the clock above, and you can check the balance with your filing number (escrow measures, art 19). With a private owner, the lease’s return date is the only clock there is.

When it goes wrong: the official routes

In order, cheapest first.

Put it in writing and keep the messages: Order 812 wants negotiation first on deposits, repairs and move-outs (art 35).
Apply to the people’s mediation committee at the street or town office; one city’s guideline lists it as the first outside step (guideline, 2020-12-10), and by law it costs nothing (People’s Mediation Law, art 4).
Call 12345, the government service line, which routes the complaint to the relevant department or the street office for mediation if both sides agree. Where a rental company is the landlord, 12315 takes a consumer complaint instead; that route is closed to tenants of a private owner (both from the same guideline; a city warning pointing tenants to 12345, 2026-01-20).
Report it to the housing authority, which Order 812 makes responsible for inspecting rental activity and handling violations (art 31).
Where escrow exists, an unresolved refund opinion goes to the local brokers’ association for mediation (escrow measures, art 11).
Arbitration or a civil suit, both named in Order 812 (art 35); the model lease has you name the court or commission before signing (art 19).
Call the police if water, power or gas is cut to push you out, or if you are threatened. Order 812 bans forcing a tenant out by violence, threats or other illegal means (art 12), and a city guideline says to dial the police in exactly that case (link). The same goes for a company that takes the money and disappears.

The penalties are what make the channels more than decoration. A false or misleading listing costs a company or broker 20,000 to 100,000 yuan (art 42); collecting your rent or deposit as a broker draws the same range (art 44); letting a converted corridor as living space brings a warning, then 20,000 to 100,000 yuan for a company or 2,000 to 10,000 for an individual (art 39).

Where these rules come from

Every figure here was re-read against the page it cites on 2026-10-11. The article numbers come from the State Council’s gazette copy of Order 812 (full text), read end to end; the circulars, the Civil Code articles and the 2011 rules come from government copies; the model lease is the market regulator’s text, annex included. Two figures changed during that pass: the escrow measures I first dated to September 2024 were issued on 2024-07-29, and the fine I first put at 1,000 to 5,000 yuan is capped at 2,000.

City material is labelled as such, and no company is named.

One market figure appears, and it is a rent: June 2026 across 55 cities, average asking rent 30.02 yuan per square metre per month, down 6.1 percent year on year — a commercial index republished by a real estate association, so a listing price rather than a signed one (association monitor, 2026-07-15). Cities also publish reference rents, one of them down to the individual housing estate (a city’s platform, read 2026-10-11); a housing authority’s advice is to compare that figure with what an agent quotes, and to treat a price well below the market as bait (guidance, 2026-03-09).

What I could not check

A national commission rate. None exists in anything I could load: the national text says negotiated, posted, reduced and shared, and sets no percentage. The one-month figure is one city’s regulation, art 46.
Whether a private landlord’s deposit is capped nationally. Every cap and escrow duty I found is addressed to rental companies and platforms; one city’s notice says personal landlords are outside its scheme.
The 2011 brokerage rules as currently in force. The justice ministry’s copy carries the 2011 text and its commencement date; I found no page confirming no later amendment.
Whether the escrow clocks hold outside the cities above. The three-working-day refund, the monthly release and the interest are city provisions.
Which numbering of the property-fee rule is current. Two official copies in one justice ministry database differ by an article — art 41 and 44 in the copy carrying the third revision, 42 and 45 in an older one. I quoted the current one.
Whether the 2023 municipal brokerage model is still current after the national model leases appeared in 2025.
Market commission levels by city. Secondary pages list percentages per city with no method and no date. Nothing from them is here.
Anything about where I live, what I pay, or who my landlord was. Deliberately absent.

Seeing a doctor in China as a foreigner: fees and waits

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A foreign passport is an accepted identity document for registering a patient record at a large public hospital in China, and the national health commission’s own English walkthrough lists the passport among the papers needed at registration (NHC, updated 2019-03-05). The awkward parts are channel fit — whether a hospital’s app takes a passport — and price: a short-term visitor pays the published list in full.

Chinese medical institutions recorded 10.65 billion patient visits and 299.1 million admissions in 2025, of which tertiary hospitals took 3.04 billion and 164.5 million (2025 national health statistical bulletin, released 2026-08-28).

Who can be seen, and with what document

Public hospitals are open to anyone with valid identification, and the commission’s own English walkthrough lists the sequence: book, register (挂号) at the desk, see the doctor, pay, collect medicine (NHC, updated 2019-03-05); newer hospital notices follow it.

The document list is where a foreigner differs. One tertiary hospital’s outpatient notice accepts a passport, alongside a social-security card or a national ID, as an original document for a first patient record, and says self-paying patients pay the full charge (hospital outpatient notice, read 2026-10-11, undated page). A second tertiary hospital’s process notice lists the same documents and requires a booking for every non-emergency visit (process notice, 2025-12-09). A municipal platform run by its city health commission takes a passport number, a name and a mobile number from non-mainland users, free of charge (health commission Q&A, 2023-10-12).

Residence status changes the payment track, not access. A foreigner lawfully employed in China is enrolled by the employer in employee medical insurance — one of five schemes — within 30 days of the employment certificate (MOHRSS Order No. 16, in force 2011-10-15, amended by Order No. 54, 2024-12-23). A permanent-residence card holder with no other cover can join resident medical insurance: one city’s in-force rules list unemployed card holders (resident-insurance rules, effective 2026-01-01), and a city government’s English guide adds uninsured spouses and minor children of work-permit holders and school enrolment for foreign students (English guide, 2025-04-27).

Everyone else self-pays or uses commercial insurance; at the hospital whose notice I read, such patients are routed to the international department, which holds direct-billing agreements with nearly 30 insurers (international department notice, 2024-06-19).

From booking to the pharmacy counter

Booking runs through four channels.

The hospital’s own app or WeChat account. One hospital releases every outpatient slot at 15:00 daily and needs a complete patient profile; an incomplete one is fixed at the cashier window with an original ID (hospital notice, read 2026-10-11).
A city unified platform. The one I read covers provincial, municipal, ministerial and district hospitals plus private ones, books seven days ahead, handles same-day registration through WeChat, and caps an account at two bookings a day and nine a month (health commission Q&A, 2023-10-12).
Self-service kiosks in the outpatient hall, mostly for the slots left that day, keyed to an ID card or a QR code (international department notice, 2024-06-19).
The counter or a phone line — the fallback when an online form rejects a passport; one international department publishes a foreign-patient line and an English app interface (English guide, read 2026-10-11).

The visit has more steps than the booking. Registration and check-in are separate: the patient reports at a kiosk or desk, takes a queue number, and only then does the name appear outside a consulting room. An insured patient who skips check-in at one hospital is billed for the whole visit as self-pay (hospital notice, read 2026-10-11). Payment and pharmacy follow, at cashier windows on every floor and the pharmacy window named on the slip; a second campus will not do. When results come back another day, the patient registers again (NHC). A missed appointment neither cancelled beforehand nor attended is a no-show; three in a year suspend online booking for 90 days (notice, read 2026-10-11).

What it costs

Registration is priced by hospital level and doctor rank, not by nationality. One municipality’s price list, in force since 2026-06-27, replaced the old medical-service fee items with level-priced consultation fees plus rank surcharges on the outpatient one; the totals landed where the old schedule had them. An uninsured patient pays the listed price in full; insured patients are reimbursed on a fixed scale (municipal price notice, published 2026-01-23; attached price list, PDF, effective 2026-06-27). Yuan.

Item	Tertiary	Secondary	Primary
Ordinary outpatient	50	30	20
Deputy chief physician	60	50	40
Chief physician	80	70	60
Named expert	100	90	80
Emergency	70	50	40
Inpatient, per day	100	60	50

Prices are ceilings; the doctor-rank rows are the base fee plus the rank surcharge.

That fee buys the slot, not the visit. Nationally, the average hospital outpatient bill in 2025 was 357.7 yuan, of which 131.8 yuan was medicine — 36.8 percent, unchanged from 2024 (bulletin, 2026-08-28).

2025, yuan	Hospitals	Public	Tertiary	Secondary
Per outpatient visit	357.7	342.7	382.1	234.7
Per admission	9,768.9	10,071.0	11,539.7	5,674.0
Per inpatient day	1,138.3	1,266.4	1,517.6	647.0

Those averages cover every patient; the bulletin does not split them by insurance status. The gradient is what matters: a community health centre outpatient bill averaged 150.1 yuan that year, under half a tertiary one (bulletin, 2026-08-28).

An ambulance is charged too: one city’s emergency centre lists 100 yuan for the pre-hospital response as an insurance item, while transport — 75 yuan per vehicle trip plus 4 yuan per kilometre, counted over the round trip — is self-pay (city emergency centre price list, read 2026-10-11), and a provincial schedule sets a 50 yuan base and 6 yuan per kilometre (provincial notice, issued 2020-01-13, effective 2020-02-01). Dial 120 for an ambulance (NHC).

Situation	Payment track
Employed in China	Employee medical insurance, enrolled by the employer within 30 days of the employment certificate
Permanent-residence card, no other cover	Eligible to join resident medical insurance in the city of residence
Foreign student	Enrolled at the school, in the city whose guide I read
Everything else	Full self-pay, or commercial insurance direct billing where the hospital has an agreement

How long it takes

In the 2023 performance monitoring of tertiary public hospitals, the average outpatient appointment rate was 67.72 percent and the wait from check-in to entering a consulting room stayed under 20 minutes (2023 tertiary public hospital monitoring notice, 国卫医政函〔2025〕55号, 2025-03-10). That metric starts at reporting in at the triage desk or on an app, so the registration counter and the payment window sit outside it (assessment manual, indicator definitions, August 2023).

Two other percentages get quoted as the appointment rate. Same year, same tier: the ministry’s patient-experience assessment reported 54.47 percent and a 17.72-minute wait after arrival (assessment via CCTV, 2024-08-16) — eight points from the monitoring report, two official series. The third counts hospitals, not visits: 64.6 percent of public hospitals at secondary level and above offer appointment-based care, per the 2025 bulletin (bulletin, 2026-08-28).

Doctor time is the other half. Public-hospital doctors handled 7.3 outpatient visits per working day in 2025 (bulletin, 2026-08-28). Over an eight-hour day that is about 66 minutes per patient — my arithmetic (480 ÷ 7.3), on an assumption about clinic hours the bulletin does not state. Inpatient time is firmer: the average hospital stay in 2025 was 8.6 days, 7.7 days at tertiary hospitals, with tertiary beds 88.3 percent occupied (bulletin, 2026-08-28). At one international department, the daytime clinic runs Monday to Friday 08:00–17:00, a night clinic to 19:00 Monday to Thursday, the weekend clinic covers mornings, and emergency is open around the clock (English guide, read 2026-10-11).

Emergency versus the ordinary clinic

Emergency departments triage before treatment. National quality-control indicators define four levels: level I needs immediate treatment, level II is assessed and treated in parallel, level III must be seen within a short period, and level IV is non-urgent and seen in order (emergency medicine quality-control indicators, 2024 edition, 2024). A local standard puts minutes on the last two: 30 minutes for level III, about an hour for level IV subacute patients, two to four hours for non-urgent ones (local standard DB4403/T 244—2022, issued 2022-07-20, effective 2022-08-01).

An ordinary appointment has a time window; an emergency visit a severity ranking, so a minor complaint that had a booked slot in the morning can wait hours at night. Emergency is priced separately — 70 yuan against 50 in that municipality (price list, effective 2026-06-27) — and one hospital sends adults at 37.3°C or above to a fever clinic (hospital notice, 2025-12-09).

Where medicine comes from

The hospital pharmacy. The doctor writes a prescription, the patient pays, and the medicine is collected from the window named on the slip (NHC); a second campus will not do there.

Retail pharmacies. Under the rules in force since 2000, prescription medicines may only be dispensed, bought and used against a physician’s prescription, while non-prescription medicines may be bought on the buyer’s own judgement; those split into two classes, and retailing the stricter class needs a drug-retail licence (NMPA Order No. 10, published 1999-06-18, effective 2000-01-01).

Online. Rules effective 2022-12-01 require real names and a verified prescription for distance sales of prescription medicine, and bar vaccines, blood products, narcotics and psychotropics from online sale (SAMR Order No. 58, published 2022-08-03). Non-prescription medicine can be ordered online. For eligible chronic patients, primary-level facilities may issue up to 12 weeks of medicine in one prescription (State Council measures on the tiered-care system, 国办发〔2026〕11号, dated 2026-04-06).

Where these numbers come from

Primary documents, read on 2026-10-11, each kept in its own unit and date.

Volumes, costs, stays, rates: the 2025 national health statistical bulletin, released 2026-08-28, read from its PDF and checked against the press summary.
Waiting time: the 2023 tertiary monitoring notice and the metric’s official definition, plus the same year’s assessment via CCTV. Two series, same year, same tier of hospitals, eight points apart; I kept each source’s wording.
Fees: one municipality’s price notice and the price list attached to it, in force since 2026-06-27, a city emergency-centre list, and a 2020 provincial ambulance schedule. None is a national figure.
Process, insurance, medicine: the commission’s English walkthrough, two hospital notices, a city booking-platform Q&A, a city government’s English guide, MOHRSS Order No. 16 with its 2024 amendment, one city’s resident-insurance rules, NMPA Order No. 10 and SAMR Order No. 58.

Local fee schedules are revised without national announcement, and the municipality above renamed its registration fee item in 2026.

What I could not check

International and VIP department prices. No national or municipal schedule that I could find; what one such department charges is not on the pages I read.
Whether a foreigner pays more than a resident at an ordinary clinic. The notices say self-paying patients pay the full charge; I found no rule imposing or forbidding a foreigner-specific supplement.
Wait times for foreigners. Published figures average all patients, and the metric excludes the steps before check-in.
Whether every hospital’s app takes a passport. One city platform documents it; hospital apps differ, and I did not test them.
English support at an ordinary counter. International departments publish English pages; a general outpatient hall I could not establish.
120 in English. No official statement that ambulance dispatch handles English calls.
How stale the hospital pages are. Two notices I rely on still use the registration-fee name abolished on 2026-06-27, and one carries no date.
Anything about the city I live in. Deliberately absent.

How to check whether a Chinese supplier is real

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A company registered in China either has a public record or it does not. What a buyer needs sits in that record plus four other files, and the checks take me about forty minutes once I have a legal name rather than a trade name.

What to check, and where

Question	Official entry point	Field to read
Does the company exist, and under what name?	国家企业信用信息公示系统 (gsxt.gov.cn)	Registered name, 统一社会信用代码, legal representative, 登记状态, 住所, 经营范围
Where is it registered, and does that match my quote?	same	Digits 3–8 of the credit code; 住所; any 经营场所 entries
Is the capital real, or promised?	same	认缴出资额 against 实缴出资额 and 出资期限
Is it on an official regulatory list?	same	entries under 经营异常名录 and 严重违法失信名单
Does it owe court-ordered money it has not paid?	中国执行信息公开网	the 失信被执行人 record
Does it have customs standing?	中国海关企业进出口信用信息公示平台	the 高级认证企业, 认证企业, 失信企业 and 严重失信企业 directories
Is the ISO certificate real and current?	全国认证认可信息公共服务平台	certificate number, holder name, certificate status

The registry, and what the law puts in it

The national registry is run by the market regulator, and its contents are listed in the Interim Regulations on the Disclosure of Enterprise Information — State Council Order 654, published 7 August 2014, revised 10 March 2024 (consolidated text, Ministry of Justice). Article 6 lists what the regulator publishes: registration and filing information, chattel-mortgage registrations, equity pledges and administrative penalties, each within 20 working days of arising. Article 10 puts a different list on the company itself — subscribed and paid-in capital, capital changes, licences, penalties.

The code, and the field most buyers skip

Every registration carries an 18-character unified social credit code, designed in the State Council’s 2015 plan for the code system (国发〔2015〕33号, 17 June 2015). Position 1 is the registering department: the code centre’s tables give 1 to 机构编制, 5 to 民政 and 9 to 工商, and show a market-regulated company starting 91 (structure, department table, 4 March 2026). Positions 3 to 8 are the administrative division code of the registering authority, the same six digits a Chinese address uses. Compare those with the province on the quote; a mismatch is not misconduct.

Registered capital is a promise on a clock

The 2023 company law, in force from 1 July 2024 (Article 266), shortened the deadline for paying in capital: Article 47 requires the shareholders of a limited liability company to pay the subscribed amounts in full within five years of incorporation, and Article 40 requires publication of the subscribed amount, the paid-in amount, the method and the dates (Company Law 2023, gov.cn). Companies registered before 30 June 2024 have until 30 June 2027 to pull a longer subscription period inside five years, under State Council Order 784, in force from 1 July 2024; Article 6 has the registry annotate a company that fails to adjust (Order 784, 1 July 2024).

Millions subscribed by a company incorporated in 2024 means little; when a sales contact offers “our registered capital is X” as evidence of strength, the paid-in number is the one that answers. The annual report also holds headcount, assets and revenue, but Article 9 of Order 654 makes that block optional, so a blank headcount is the default, not a warning.

The two lists, and what removal erases

The abnormal operations list (经营异常名录) has four grounds under Article 4 of the abnormal operations rules — Order 68 of 19 August 2014, amended by Order 101 on 18 March 2025 and Order 108 on 21 November 2025 (current text, SAMR): a late annual report, information left unpublished after an order to publish, an unregistered name change, and an address where the company cannot be reached. The third ground replaced the 2014 rule’s false-filings ground (2014 text, gov.cn). Article 5 fixes what an entry carries: name, credit code, date listed, ground, deciding authority. Article 9 defines unreachable as two registered letters returned unsigned, 15 to 30 days apart. Article 10 says that on removal the authority stops publishing the listing, so an empty record cannot distinguish never-listed from listed-and-repaired.

The serious list (严重违法失信名单) has been governed since 15 July 2026 by SAMR Order 128, published 25 May 2026, which repealed Order 44 of 30 July 2021 (Order 128, SAMR). Article 3 requires egregious conduct and a heavier administrative penalty. Removal runs through SAMR Order 107, in force 25 December 2025: Article 13 lets a listed party apply to come out once the listing has run a year, and the authority removes it at three years (Order 107, SAMR). Article 20 of Order 128 should make a buyer pause over an empty page: if the penalty a listing rested on is revoked or declared invalid, the listing is cancelled within three working days.

The two records the registry does not carry

Court enforcement is published by the Supreme People’s Court on 中国执行信息公开网, under the 2013 rules on the dishonest-debtor list — adopted 1 July 2013, in force 1 October 2013, amended 16 January 2017 (rules text; the court’s notice of the start date, 24 December 2013). Article 6 fixes what an entry shows: the debtor’s name, credit code and legal representative, the obligation and what has been performed, the specific conduct, the case number and the court. Article 2 gives the inclusion a term — two years, extendable by one to three where violence, threats or multiple dishonest acts are involved.

Customs standing is the other. The rules are 海关总署令第282号, adopted 30 December 2025, published 13 January 2026, effective 1 April 2026 (Order 282, State Council gazette). Article 4 sets five grades: 高级认证企业, 认证企业, 常规企业, 失信企业, 严重失信企业. Article 8 makes the first two China’s Authorised Economic Operators, the status carrying mutual-recognition benefits abroad.

The query platform is credit.customs.gov.cn. Its index page names the directories 高级认证企业名录, 认证企业名录, 失信企业名录 and 严重失信企业名录, and those labels come from the 2026 rules, so a claimed AEO status is checkable in principle, though not by me. A factory exporting through a trading company or freight agent may hold no customs registration, so absence there is not evidence.

What a factory visit can settle

The address on the licence against the address of the production floor. A trading company’s registered address is an office, and the factory it uses is a supplier it does not own. That is legal and common, and it changes who you are dealing with: your recourse runs to the company you paid, not the plant.

Certificates are checkable on 全国认证认可信息公共服务平台 at cx.cnca.cn, through its 认证结果查询 screen; the accreditation body’s page only points there (CNAS page, 11 October 2026). Read the status, not the logo: valid, suspended, withdrawn, cancelled, expired.

On an ISO 9001 certificate there is a softer check. IAF MD 5:2019, Table QMS 1 ties minimum initial audit time to effective personnel: 1.5 days for 1 to 5, 10 days for 276 to 425, 12 for 626 to 875 (IAF MD 5:2019, issued 11 November 2019). Audit time can be adjusted down, so a certificate for a claimed 400-person plant after a two-day audit is a question, not a verdict.

Signals that are not evidence

A well-built website says nothing about registration, and certificate screenshots are images too; check whether the number and the holder’s name resolve in the registry, and whether that name is the one you will pay.

Platform badges mean what the platform says. Alibaba’s buyer guide defines a Gold Supplier as a business verified as legally registered by a third party, a Verified Supplier as one whose profile, management, capabilities, products and processes third parties have assessed, and a Trade Assurance Supplier as one that accepts payment through the platform (Alibaba buyer guide, 11 October 2026). A badge narrows a search; it does not verify a product.

The payment sequence is the real control

Two rules do more than any registry page. Pay the legal entity whose registered name matches the contract and the registry record. Pay into an account in that entity’s own name. A last-minute change of beneficiary account, a request to pay a personal account, or payment to a similarly named company elsewhere moves the transaction outside every check you did.

Platform protection is the second lever, in the form the platform publishes it: Trade Assurance covers orders paid online through the platform, is free for buyers, and allows a refund request within 30 days of delivery (Alibaba buyer terms, 11 October 2026). Payment must go through the platform order rather than third-party apps or sites, and the terms are the platform’s, so they can change. For a larger first order a documentary credit moves the money against documents rather than trust, under UCP 600 (ICC, UCP 600, 11 October 2026).

I could not trace the familiar 30% deposit and 70% before shipment split to a primary publisher, so I treat it as an opening position and prefer a sequence tied to evidence: sample approved, then a deposit; inspection passed, then the balance. The test order is one carton at a size the factory will actually run, paid in full and inspected, because the names on the invoice, the bank account, the package and the registry have to match.

How I checked this

I read each rule at the publisher, and fetched every page above on 11 October 2026 unless it carries its own date. Four version traps showed up: the serious-list rules changed on 15 July 2026, when Order 128 replaced Order 44; the abnormal operations rules were amended twice in 2025, one ground replaced outright; the customs rules moved to a five-grade scheme on 1 April 2026; and credit repair is no longer the 2021 notice 国市监信规〔2021〕3号 but Order 107, in force 25 December 2025.

Reachability differed by host. credit.customs.gov.cn refused a plain request with 412 and, in a browser, served its own block page; its directory names reached me only through a reader proxy. gsxt.gov.cn answered 521 to a plain request, 521 through a local proxy, and 412 through the reader proxy, and a browser that cleared its JavaScript cookie challenge still got an empty document. cx.cnca.cn returned the same 521 challenge.

What I could not check

The registry page itself. Every route I tried to gsxt.gov.cn was challenged rather than served, so the field list above comes from the regulation, not a live record. A challenge to automated access is not the same as a missing record.
The GB 32100-2015 standard text. The structure above is cited from the code centre’s tables and the 2015 plan; I could not read the standard itself.
The Trade Assurance payment-terms page. tradeassurance.alibaba.com/ta/Payment.htm would not resolve here on 11 October 2026, so the payment claims rest on the buyer-terms page.
Whether a removed abnormal-operations entry stays visible in mirrors. Article 10 says the authority stops publishing it; third-party mirrors I did not test.
Whether every production site must be registered separately, and whether Alibaba’s definitions cover every badge. No rule requires the first in general terms, and badge tiers change.
The UCP 600 clause text. I link the ICC library entry, which sits behind ICC’s subscription; I did not read the articles.
The 30%/70% payment split. Industry-common figure, unverified.
Product quality. Nothing above tells you whether a product is good, only whether the entity behind it is what it claims to be.

The case against one language to rule agents

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The assumption I had was Armin Ronacher’s starting premise: that the enormous corpus of existing code would freeze today’s programming languages in place, because a new language would have to overcome it. He now argues the opposite — that agentic engineering opens room for new languages rather than closing it, and sketches what a language designed for agents instead of humans would optimise for.

Read it for the reasoning rather than the prediction. It is one of the few pieces written from how agents actually fail, which is a more useful starting point than another round of benchmark numbers.

Armin Ronacher

Code review is the transferable skill

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Sean Goedecke’s argument: a model produces code far faster than it produces judgement, so the skill that decides the outcome is reviewing what it hands back — the same instinct that catches a bad design in a pull request, pointed at a much higher volume.

It names the failure mode these tools are best at hiding: the code compiles, the tests pass, and the structure is wrong. That is worth remembering when the headline number is how much code was generated.

Sean Goedecke

Six steps to actually using an agent

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Mitchell Hashimoto’s account of adopting AI tools is unusually concrete: six named steps, from dropping the chatbot through to always having an agent running, each with what it replaced and what it cost him.

The order is the useful part. Reproduce your own work before outsourcing it, and build the harness before trusting it at scale — two of the six steps are about engineering the setup rather than writing better prompts, which is roughly where the effort lands when you measure agent runs instead of reading announcements.

Mitchell Hashimoto

A token counter that survives two years

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Simon Willison updated ttok, his command-line tool for counting tokens with OpenAI’s tiktoken library, after leaving it alone for about two years: a Click warning fixed, CI refreshed, and a new --list-models. It runs without installing anything — cat file.txt | uvx ttok.

Worth keeping within reach for the same reason a kitchen scale is: the count is what turns “this prompt is long” into a number you can act on, and guessing is how per-task cost estimates go wrong. Publishing after two years of silence is also a decent argument that a small tool does not have to be maintained to stay useful.

Simon Willison

The list of blogs that actually get read

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A plain gist ranking the most popular blogs on Hacker News in 2025. As of today it has 1,799 stars and 256 forks — for a list of links, which tells you how few of these exist that are compiled rather than pitched.

It is where the reading list on this site started, and the reason the feeds here now carry the whole post: the feed depth of every entry on it was measured, and the sites that survive social media are mostly the ones handing readers their text instead of a teaser.

emschwartz, on GitHub

同款比价：口径不写在旁边，数字就没意义

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

比价表最容易骗人的地方，是数字旁边空着的那一块。

我在网上见过不少中美的同款比价，写法都差不多：国内 ¥X，美国 $Y。汇率取的是哪天不知道，美国那个价含不含销售税不知道，运费算没算进去不知道。换一个渠道，结论就能翻过来。

所以这次我给自己定了一条规矩，每一格价格后面必须交代三件事：哪一天读的、哪个渠道、含不含税。交代不了就留空，写”没核到”。

下面五件东西，都能查到具体型号。型号写出来，一是为了你能自己去复核，二是让”同款”这两个字有个能检验的定义。

定下来的五个型号

Apple 20W USB-C 电源适配器，型号 A2305（来自 Apple 页面脚注）。中国版号 MWVW3CH/A、美国版号 MWVV3AM/A，都取自 Apple 网址。
AirPods 5，基础款配 USB-C 充电盒，另一档配无线充电盒。
AirPods Pro 3。
罗技 MX Master 3S。零件号 910-006556 出现在美国页和加拿大页的网址里，910-006557 出现在中国页的网址里；页面正文不显示零件号。
Anker Zolo 磁吸充电宝 10K 30W 自带线，型号 A1685。

选它们的理由很实际：前三件在苹果官网，第四件在罗技官网，第五件在 Anker 官网。品牌自己的店，页面能读、日期能标，价格不是我估的。

同日标价对照

下面所有价格和费率都是 2026 年 10 月 9 日读的。

物件（型号）	中国官方标价	海外官方标价
Apple 20W USB-C 电源适配器（A2305）	¥149（Apple 中国）	$19.00（Apple 美国）
AirPods 5	¥999（Apple 中国）	$129.00（Apple 美国）
AirPods Pro 3	¥1,899（Apple 中国）	$249.00（Apple 美国）
罗技 MX Master 3S 蓝牙版	没核到	$99.99（Logitech 美国）；CA$119.99，原价 CA$139.99（Logitech 加拿大）
Anker Zolo 磁吸充电宝 10K 30W（A1685）	没核到	$49.99（Anker 美国）

苹果那两个购买页上同时列出了更高一档的配置：AirPods 5 除 ¥999 / $129.00 之外还有 ¥1,149 / $149.00。表里比的是每个页面的最低配价格。

罗技中国站和安克中国站我都打开了。罗技中国官网的商品页（链接）有规格、颜色、包装内容，结构化数据里的价格写的是 0，就是没有标价。安克的 .com.cn 是集团站（链接），页面上列的是中国区天猫和京东旗舰店，不直接卖货，而平台页读不到。这两格我宁可留空。

顺带一个反例：小米商城的商品页是能读到价格的，比如小米智能无线开关（双开）页面上的价格区同时出现 59 元和 79 元（小米商城），也在 10 月 9 日读的。所以”国内价格抓不到”不成立，“看渠道”才成立。

汇率用中国外汇交易中心公布的人民币汇率中间价，2026 年 10 月 9 日 9:15：1 美元 = 6.7330 元，1 加元 = 4.7204 元（中国货币网）。

按这个汇率折一遍：

电源适配器：$19.00 折 ¥127.9，中国 ¥149 高出 16.5%。
AirPods 5：$129.00 折 ¥868.6，中国 ¥999 高出 15.0%。
AirPods Pro 3：$249.00 折 ¥1,676.5，中国 ¥1,899 高出 13.3%。
罗技：美国 $99.99 折 ¥673.2，加拿大 CA$119.99 折 ¥566.4，加拿大比美国低 15.9%。

看到这里，很容易写一句”中国更贵”。先别急：美国那三个价格不含销售税。

口径一：含税和不含税

美国标价不含销售税，结账时才加，税率取决于收货地址（CDTFA）。加州的基础州税率是 7.25%，各县市另加 0.10% 到 2.00% 的地区税。只按基础州税率算：

适配器 $19.00 变成 $20.38，折 ¥137.2，中国价高出 8.6%。
AirPods 5 $129.00 变成 $138.35，折 ¥931.5，中国价高出 7.2%。
AirPods Pro 3 $249.00 变成 $267.05，折 ¥1,798.1，中国价高出 5.6%。

16.5% 变 8.6%，13.3% 变 5.6%。同一批数字，加一条税的规定，结论砍掉一半。

中国这边，标价就是你要付的钱：《价格法》第十三条写明，经营者不得在标价之外加价出售商品，不得收取任何未予标明的费用（国家发改委）。2022 年 7 月 1 日起施行的《明码标价和禁止价格欺诈规定》把同一条写进第八条（市场监管总局）。至于中国零售标价里是否含增值税，我没找到明文，不写结论。

口径二：运费的名字比数字重要

跨境运费有四个变量，比价表里一般一个都不写。

首重和续重。 首重是最低计费单位，续重是超出的部分。菜鸟集运的中美线公开价是：标准空运 ¥43 / 0.5kg，经济空运 ¥35 / 0.5kg，首重续重同价；经济海运 ¥66 / 1kg 首重、¥10.5 / 1kg 续重（菜鸟集运）。同一个页面上还有另一组经济海运数字：¥88 / 1kg 首重、¥21 / 1kg 续重。我没有去猜哪组对，两组都照抄。

体积重。 轻而大的包裹，物流方把体积折成重量，和实重取大的那个收费。麻烦在除数不统一：

服务	体积重公式	来源
京东物流国际特快	长×宽×高(cm) ÷ 5000	京东物流国际特快价目表
中邮海外购（中国邮政）	长×宽×高(cm) ÷ 6000	中邮海外购·服务与价格

一个 36×26×10 厘米的盒子是 9,360 立方厘米：按 6000 算是 1.56 公斤，按 5000 算是 1.872 公斤，差 20%。同一件东西，运费差两成，只因为除数是 6000 还是 5000。

直邮和集运差一个量级。 还是中美线。京东物流的公开价目表（2025 年 3 月 1 日起生效）里美国属于第 6 区，0.5 公斤起 340 元/票，1 公斤 411 元，2 公斤 551 元，并注明不含燃油附加费等。菜鸟集运的标准空运同样 0.5 公斤是 43 元。340 和 43 不是同一种服务，时效、清关方式、能寄什么品类都不一样；但如果一张比价表只写”运费约 50 元”，读者没法知道自己被对标到了哪一档。

“包税”要看清含的是哪边的税。 菜鸟集运页面上，空运含税普货 ¥59 / 0.5kg，空运含税特货 ¥120 / 0.5kg。含税指的是目的地清关那一段由承运方处理。含税与不含税差 16 元起。一边写含税价、一边写不含税价，差额就是凭空多出来的。

反方向也一样。中邮海外购的美国特拉华仓到中国，走美中标准快件，初级会员 45 元 / 500g，最低收费 60 元（中邮海外购）。同一公斤数，转运和直邮的报价不在一个数量级上，这跟服务和谁承担清关有关。

汇率本身也是报价的一部分。 中邮海外购的页面上挂着一组数字，标着”今日汇率”：美元 6.9096、欧元 7.9338、英镑 8.8412、日元 0.0586、澳元 4.9218（中邮海外购·服务与价格）。对比同一天的中间价，美元高 2.6%，欧元高 5.3%，澳元高 5.3%。日元那项差了 37.7%，我判断不出口径。这组数字旁边没有写具体日期。一件 249 美元的耳机，先不算运费和税，光汇率这一层就差约 44 元。

口径三：税，两条腿完全不同

国外寄进中国，走个人物品。 2024 年 12 月 1 日起施行《进境物品关税、增值税、消费税征收办法》（税委会公告 2024 年第 11 号）。配套的海关总署公告 2024 年第 175 号规定：计税价格以实际购买价格为基础；实际价存疑或无法确定时，才依次使用《计税价格表》列明的价格，而且实际价达到列明价 2 倍及以上或 1/2 及以下时也不用列明价。税率按《计税价格表》里的”综合税率”走。（海关总署官网的公告页拦自动化访问，此处引商务部转载。）

我读到的 2024 版附表（中邮海外购镜像）里这几行是：耳机及耳塞机 13%，鼠标 13%，键盘 13%，锂离子蓄电池一类 20%，其他电池 50%，笔记本电脑 13%。

50 元免征额还在：应征进口税税额在 50 元（含）以下免征。这一条出自海关总署公告 2010 年第 43 号，海关总署的解读和中邮海外购的计税价格表页都引述了它。

按这套算 AirPods Pro 3：1,899 × 13% = 246.9 元，超过 50 元，不免。

国外寄进中国，走跨境电商平台。 关税税率暂设 0%，进口环节增值税、消费税按法定应纳税额的 70% 征收（财关税〔2016〕18 号，国家税务总局广东省税务局）。单次交易限值 5,000 元，年度限值 26,000 元（财关税〔2018〕49 号，中国政府网）。同一件 AirPods Pro 3，折下来的税率相当于 13% × 70% = 9.1%，税额 172.8 元。

同一个物件、同一批税种，个人邮寄 246.9 元，跨境电商 172.8 元，差 74 元。比价表不写渠道，这个差价就是隐形的。

中国寄到美国，这一侧去年变了。 2025 年 7 月 30 日的行政令 14324 把所有国家都从 de minimis 免税里拿了出来：2025 年 8 月 29 日起，价值 800 美元及以下的进口货物不再免关税，要按适用税率交关税、税和费（CBP 说明页、联邦公报）。中国和香港更早，2025 年 5 月 2 日就停了（CBP 新闻稿）。

意思是从中国寄一件 99 美元的东西到美国，2024 年和 2026 年是两件事。我拿不到 AirPods 对应的美国税则号列和税率，所以美国那一段的到岸税算不出来，只能留空。

口径四：退货和保修

在中国境内网购，退货适用七日无理由那一套（网络购买商品七日无理由退货暂行办法）；跨境直邮的订单是否落入这套境内规则，我没找到明文。
保修按购买地。苹果的脚注写明：在你购买 AppleCare 服务计划的国家或地区之外，保修服务无法保证提供（Apple 中国 AirPods 5 购买页）。
跨境电商零售进口商品自海关放行之日起 30 日内退货，可以申请退税（财关税〔2016〕18 号），个人邮寄渠道有没有对应条款，我没找到。
包裹被海关要求退运，运费谁承担，各家转运条款不一样。这项成本从不进比价表，可能比运费更贵。

我为什么算不出一个到手价

两个方向我都试着算到底，都停在同类的地方。

从美国寄进中国，缺的是承运方的实收附加费。关税公式我能引，“到手一共多少钱”我引不出来，因为公开页上还有分拣费、报关费。

从中国寄到美国，缺的是美国那一段的税则税率。de minimis 停掉之后，这一项从”没有”变成”必须有”，而它随品类和原产地变。

这篇给的是标价，加上每一层口径的算法和出处。谁要拿它做决定，把缺的两项补上，剩下的算式是现成的。

What I could not check

罗技 MX Master 3S 的中国官方标价。罗技中国官网商品页里没有价格（结构化数据的价格字段是 0），京东、天猫的商品页有频控，我读到的是空壳。
Anker Zolo 磁吸充电宝在中国的售价。安克的中国官网是集团站，中国区走天猫和京东旗舰店。
罗技页面正文不显示零件号 910-006556 / 910-006557，只能从网址读出，没有页内文字可对照。
中国零售标价是否已含增值税。价格法和明码标价规定只写”不得在标价之外加价”，没有明文说标价含税。
中邮海外购那五个汇率数字的具体日期。页面只标”今日汇率”；日元一项与同日中间价差 37.7%，我判断不出口径。
菜鸟集运同一页面上两组经济海运报价哪组现行。¥66 / 1kg 与 ¥88 / 1kg 并存，两组我都照抄。
京东物流国际特快的燃油附加费、偏远地区附加费金额。价目表说这些不含在内，要另行查。
美国对中国邮寄包裹的税则号列与关税税率（AirPods 一类消费电子）。de minimis 取消后它决定到手价，我没有第一手来源。
个人邮寄进境每次限值 2,000 元，我只在转运公司页面看到它引述”海关总署公告 2024 年第 176 号”，没有原文页。
中国个人邮寄出境包裹是否有对应退税条款。跨境电商渠道有（财关税〔2016〕18 号），个人邮寄没找到。
集运费率里第一段国内运费（卖家到集运仓）。通常是平台包邮，但我没读到任何一家平台的公开费率。
本站没有任何联盟链接，也不收广告；上面所有链接都是商品页、费率页或法规原文。

Baduanjin in twelve minutes, movement by movement

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Stand in a park here before breakfast and you will see the same eight movements, done at the same speed, to a recording that counts the breaths out loud. It takes about twelve minutes. It looks simple from outside, which is why so many get the shapes wrong.

What follows is what each section asks of the body, which direction things travel, and the mistakes the sport administration’s own correction sheet names.

This is not medical advice. It diagnoses and treats nothing; it describes a public routine and its published instructions.

Twelve minutes, in a table

The counts are in the standard. What people get wrong is that it is not eight movements, one round each: section one is six rounds, section eight is seven.

Clock	Section	Rounds	Breathing (draft standard)	Measured (mine, ±10 s)
0:00–0:38	预备势 standing	settle, then 3 breaths holding the ball	natural 1–2, in on 3, out on 4	38 s
0:38–2:10	1. 两手托天理三焦	6	natural 1–2, in 3–4, brief hold 5, out 6	93 s
2:10–3:39	2. 左右开弓似射雕	3	in 1–2 and 4, out 3 and 5, hold as the bow sets	89 s
3:39–4:50	3. 调理脾胃须单举	3	in 1–2, out 3–4, hold as the top sets	71 s
4:50–5:59	4. 五劳七伤往后瞧	3	in 1–2, out 3, hold as the turn sets	69 s
5:59–7:40	5. 摇头摆尾去心火	3	in 1, 3, 4, 7; out 2, 5, 6, 8	101 s
7:40–9:30	6. 两手攀足固肾腰	6	in 1, 3, 4, 7; out 2 and 5; hold on 6	110 s
9:30–10:45	7. 攒拳怒目增气力	3	in 1 and 5; out 2 and 3; hold on 4	75 s
10:45–11:37	8. 背后七颠百病消	7	in on the lift, out on the drop, hold before settling	52 s
11:37–11:59	收势 closing	—	in on 1, out on 2, then natural	22 s

One up-and-down is one round for sections 1, 6 and 8; one left-and-right is one round for 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 (八段锦团体标准, draft for comment §5, April 2026). The breathing column is the draft’s own instruction (§5.1–5.10, April 2026).

“Twelve minutes” is a label, not a fixed length. Four public run-throughs whose titles all say twelve minutes measure 708, 712, 719 and 735 seconds — 11:48 to 12:15 (708, 712, 719, 735, durations read from the platform pages, 2026-10-09).

The seconds above come from one run-through of 719 seconds. A second, independent pass over the same recording agrees within a few seconds everywhere except two boundaries: section two starts about eight seconds earlier in it, section seven about five seconds later. Treat the middle of the table as ±10 seconds; the round counts, from the standard, are exact.

The eight movements, one by one

The left column is position and direction, condensed from the standard’s technical section; the right column is what the sport administration’s correction sheet names as the habitual error (健身气功·八段锦习惯性错误及纠正方法, 10 January 2018).

Section	Position and direction	Errors the correction sheet names
预备势	Feet together, then the left foot steps out to shoulder width, toes forward, weight between both legs. Arms rise to about 45° at the sides, palms back, then gather in front of the abdomen: palms inward at navel height, fingertips 10–20 cm apart, elbows dropped, armpits hollow, crown lifted.	Stepping out while watching the foot, or landing with the feet turned out — land the toes first, then press the heel out until the feet are parallel. Arms stiff and held too high with the fingers angled at the floor — keep the elbows down and the palms at navel height.
1. 两手托天理三焦	Fingers interlaced in front of the lower belly, palms up. The hands rise close to the body’s vertical line and finish straight, beside the ears, with the chin tucked and the toes gripping the floor; the head goes back only as they pass the face and comes level once the arms are straight. On the way down they separate to about 45° below shoulder height, shoulders sinking, wrists relaxing.	Looking up before the hands rise — the eyes follow them from chest height. Arms leaning forward instead of travelling a near-vertical line. Ripping the hands apart at the top instead of softening the elbows and pressing the wrists so they open slowly.
2. 左右开弓似射雕	Wrists crossed about 30 cm from the chest at shoulder height, left arm outside. Push left at shoulder height with a flat hand, the middle, ring and little fingers bent only at the first two joints; pull right to the front of the right shoulder with the thumb tucked. The pushing wrist and the pulling elbow stay level with the shoulders; knees behind the toes; the head turns along the push while the trunk stays square. The round ends with the pulling hand opening up past the head and out to shoulder height, a half circle of about 180°.	Hands crossed too high and close. Weight drifting onto the pulling side, tilting the stance and dragging the pushing hand high. Opening the pulling hand straight forward instead of up and over.
3. 调理脾胃须单举	The raised palm flat and facing straight up, its middle fingertip on a vertical line over the shoulder that grazes the ear. The other hand presses down beside the hip, about 10 cm out, fingers forward, force in the heel of the palm. The big toe presses the floor as the two hands pull apart, and the raised arm returns by the path it went up.	The lifting hand ending forward of or outside the shoulder. The palm tilting instead of lying flat and facing up. The middle fingertip crossing the body’s centre line on the way up or down — it passes the line, it does not cross it.
4. 五劳七伤往后瞧	Arms straight and slightly back, rotating out to about 45° from vertical with the palms facing diagonally back and up, shoulder blades drawing together as the chest opens; the hands never swing behind the body. The head turns without the trunk turning, chin tucked so both eyes stay on one level; the head returns before the hands press down beside the hips.	The arms barely rotating, so they stay beside the body rather than opening to 45°. The chin jutting up and the trunk leaning back, leaving the eyes at different heights.
5. 摇头摆尾去心火	Feet three foot-widths apart in a horse stance, fingertips on the inner thighs with the base of each palm hanging off the outside, so the hands carry nothing. The trunk tilts about 45°, bends forward and turns until the eyes are on the foot on that side; then the tailbone travels right, front, left and back while the head turns left and back, head higher than tail, each through roughly 270° in opposite directions.	Leaning on the palms. Bending too far with the hips pushed out, so head and tail move at one height. The tailbone swinging only backward, never forward. A stiff neck and lower back, so the trunk rocks and the shoulders wobble instead.
6. 两手攀足固肾腰	Palms press down in front of the chest with the hands low and the elbows high, near shoulder height, then thread back under the armpits and run down beside the spine; the trunk stays upright until the hands pass the buttocks. Knees straight for the whole descent. To rise: sink the lower back, lift the hips, raise the head, and let the arms lead the body up to horizontal and then overhead, hands beside the ears.	The hands sliding in too high under the armpits. Bending forward too early, or looking down as the hands run along the back. Standing up before the arms move.
7. 攒拳怒目增气力	Horse stance, fists at the waist with the fist eyes up. The fist closes gradually as the elbow leaves the ribs; the elbow is never locked; the toes grip and the eyes widen as they follow the fist. The waist turns with the shoulder following while the hips and head stay still. The palm traces a full circle around the wrist — down, right, up, left — then the thumb goes to the base of the ring finger and all four fingers fold over it together.	A fast punch with the elbow locked straight. An incomplete wrist rotation before the fingers close. Closing the fingers one at a time, starting from the little finger.
8. 背后七颠百病消	Feet together, crown lifted, shoulders down, tailbone tucked, abdomen drawn in. The heels rise with the toes gripping, legs straight and pressed together, the little toe taking the load at the outer edge. The weight stays between the middle of the foot and the ball, and the heels travel down evenly to tap, the teeth closing at the moment of contact.	The weight swinging forward and back, so the balance wobbles. A pause or a feeble landing on the way down — too hard and too light are both wrong.
收势	Arms out to about 45°, then in to gather over the lower belly with the palms stacked, one settling breath there, one more as the hands separate, one more before walking away.	Rushing the close — the correction sheet names impatience as the error.

Four faults recur: the shoulders lift when they should sink; the trunk loses its upright line, usually because a movement is taken further than described; the head drops or tilts, breaking the eye line that several sections use as their reference; and in the held positions the hands travel past the line they are given. Three positions are self-checking, which is why the text states them so precisely: the knee behind the toe in the horse stance, the middle fingertip on the shoulder line in section three, and the arms leading the rise in section six.

How to tell you are doing it right

The standard gives a dose: at least three days a week, at least thirty minutes a day (draft §6.3.3, April 2026). Press coverage of the release quotes a doctor who worked on the draft: 9–10 a.m. is the best time, and one or two full run-throughs a day is enough (人民网, 10 June 2026).

Warm hands and feet, a comfortable mood, a clear head, a better appetite: the draft lists these as normal, along with heat, cold, numbness, itching, feelings of being light, heavy, large or small, crawling sensations and muscle twitching (§6.4.2, April 2026). Soreness after a heavier session is handled by changing the load (§6.4.1, April 2026).

Older official material states the load test plainly: afterwards you should not feel tired, your mood good, your pulse and blood pressure steady, appetite and sleep normal; if not, the load is too high (健身气功·八段锦”三调”要义, 5 December 2017).

On breathing, the table asks for a short hold at each held position; the 2017 article puts that hold at about two seconds, but that is not where a beginner starts. Both it and the teachers interviewed in the press say to learn the movements first on natural breathing and add the breath later (新京报, 19 December 2023).

When to stop

Stop at once, rest, and get medical help if needed, if you get: chest tightness, pain in the front of the chest, palpitations, a badly irregular heartbeat; dizziness, headache, blurred vision or a blackout; difficulty breathing or severe shortness of breath; sharp joint or muscle pain; any other clearly unbearable discomfort (draft §8.2, April 2026).

Do not force the breath to match the movement, and pause to ask someone qualified if anything odd happens physically or mentally (§8.1, §6.4.3, April 2026). People with existing conditions, or who are pregnant or menstruating, should be assessed by a doctor or rehabilitation professional first, and the standard advises against it for people with severe mental disorders (§8.3, April 2026). A Beijing Sport University associate professor quoted in the press adds: not straight after a meal, not after drinking, not while very upset (新京报, 19 December 2023); the draft says the same in its own words, adding hunger and exhaustion.

The January 2026 briefing from the national traditional-medicine administration is the most specific public statement I found on what to do short of stopping (国家中医药管理局, 21 January 2026). Fatigue lasting more than three days, or soreness bad enough to interfere with daily activity, or soreness with dizziness, palpitations, a dry mouth or insomnia, is not the body adapting; it is a method problem. The advice is to stop and find which part went wrong: too much range, so reduce the range; wrong breathing, so drop the pairing for now and go back to plain abdominal breathing; too much intensity, so shorten the session, for example from thirty minutes to fifteen, rest two or three days and restart low and slow. The same briefing says older adults and people with high blood pressure should exhale as soon as the inhale is full, not hold it.

For scale: a systematic review of 47 trials with 3,877 participants found that only two of them reported any adverse event, and only 22 described how they checked for harm (The Safety of Baduanjin Exercise, 2021, 21 January 2021) — rarely reported, not proven rare.

Where the versions disagree

The order most people learn comes from the sport administration’s set, maintained since 2003 (功法源流, 20 December 2016): lift, draw the bow, one hand up, look back, shake head and tail, hold the feet, fists and stare, seven bounces. That is the order the table measures and the standard fixes (T/CACM 1676-2026, released 28 May 2026). That version was compiled from 64 traditional versions and released in 2003 (国家中医药管理局, 21 January 2026), and a Beijing Sport University professor told a newspaper in 2023 that more than seventy circulate (新京报, 19 December 2023).

The older written tradition differs. The same page quotes the late-Qing illustrated version, the first with the name and pictures, as: shake head and tail, the seven bounces, fists and stare, holding the feet. Two positions swap, and a university museum page from 2014 prints the same order (北京中医药大学中医药博物馆, 6 November 2014). Further back it stops matching: the Song-dynasty 《道枢》 version on that page has eight phrases and no seven bounces at all. A military adaptation in the PLA’s newspaper runs the same eight movements with the punches sixth and holding the feet seventh, adds a three-to-five-second breath hold to every section and a shout on the punch, and finishes the whole set in about ten minutes (解放军报, 24 February 2021).

Seated (文八段) and standing (武八段) families exist, and the drift reaches English. A China Daily beginner’s guide numbers its fifth posture 攒拳怒目增气力 and its seventh 摇头摆尾去心火, with the descriptions swapped, writes section three as 调理脾胃臂单举 and section eight as 背后七颠诸病消, and credits the list to a language school rather than to the sport administration (China Daily, 10 May 2024).

The standard moved between draft and release: the April draft’s contents page called the first section 双手托天理三焦, while the registry’s section list for the released version says 两手托天理三焦. The draft carried three annexes — terminology, disease recommendations, resources — and the registry entry lists four, splitting out the meridian and point diagrams.

How I checked this

Form, counts and breathing come from the draft of the standard’s technical section, section 5, posted for public comment on 30 April 2026 (notice, PDF, drafting notes). The released standard’s text is not public; what I could read of it is the registry entry.
The mistake list is translated from the sport administration’s correction sheet for the same set; it lists errors, no timings.
The timings are mine: I ran speech recognition over one public run-through labelled twelve minutes (11:59, 719 seconds) and read the boundaries where the announcer speaks each posture name. A second pass, band-limiting the audio to the speech band and marking where the voice starts and stops, agreed within a few seconds at every boundary except the two noted above. The column totals to the video’s length within a second.
The twelve-minute figure was checked against four public videos of the same routine, read from their pages rather than played.

What I could not check

The final standard. I read the April 2026 draft for comment; the published T/CACM 1676-2026 is dated 28 May 2026 and its text is not public. Every count and breathing instruction here is from the draft, and I cannot see whether any of them changed. I could not obtain a later draft.
How many annexes the released standard has. The sports ministry’s news report of the release says eight chapters and three annexes (中国体育报, 29 May 2026); the standards registry lists four. I cannot tell which is right.
The per-movement seconds. One video, two passes, one announcer. The twelve-minute range is the platform’s own duration field, not a measurement of my own.
Whether the recording’s repetitions match the standard’s. The recogniser’s output is too rough to count cue words reliably, and two runs disagree with each other: one undercounts section eight at four bounces, the other, seeded with the cue words, catches seven. Where the cues do come through they sit near the standard’s numbers — three lift-and-drop pairs in section three, three cycles in section four — but that is a spot check, not verification. The round counts here come from the draft, not from the audio, so if a recording differs, the clock column describes the recording and the round column describes the standard.
The official demonstration video. The draft’s resource list points to one on the health-qigong association’s site. I did not measure it; the twelve-minute figure rests on public uploads.
The closed-breath duration. The 2017 official article gives about two seconds at the transition points; the standard says to hold but gives no duration (single source).
The effect claims. Annex B of the draft lists doses and outcomes for 13 conditions, citing trials. I did not read those trials and am not repeating their conclusions.
The book. The standard’s resource list cites 健身气功·八段锦 (People’s Sports Press, 2018 edition). I have not read it, so nothing here is checked against it.

The Chinese open-weights release timeline, dated

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is a list of dates, not an argument. Every row is a model whose weights were published for anyone to download, with a date I could trace back to the organization that published it, a parameter count as stated by that organization, and a link.

Most timelines of this kind are written from memory or from coverage, which is why they drift. I built this one from vendor pages, papers and Hugging Face’s API. This revision leaves the table at 67 rows: seven are new, one of them because an entry I dropped in the first pass turns out to be open-weights after all. The dropped list at the end has eleven entries, each with a reason.

How to read this timeline

Open weights only. A release is in the table only if the organization published downloadable weights. API-only and hosted-only models are out, including flagship ones: Qwen3-Max, the served ERNIE models, Kimi’s hosted variants, DeepSeek’s API-only models.

A date I could trace. The Date column has two kinds of value. A plain date is the date on the organization’s own dated page — a research blog post, a news post, a release page, an accepted paper. A date marked † is the Hugging Face repository creation timestamp in UTC, read from the Hugging Face API on 2026-10-09, used when the vendor had no dated page I could read. The two can differ by a few days, and that is usually preparation rather than a different release: DeepSeek-V3’s weights repository was created 2024-12-25 12:52 UTC and the announcement is dated 2024-12-26.

Parameter counts come from the vendor, or they are blank. Total parameters with activated parameters for mixture-of-experts models, as stated on the announcement, the model card, or the repository holding the same weights. A family that ships many sizes gets a range. Where none of the vendor’s pages for that release states a count, the cell is — rather than a number carried over from a sibling model, even when the lineage makes the number obvious.

One link per row, to the vendor or the weight repository. No aggregator links, no news coverage. That makes most rows single-source by construction: each cites the vendor’s own statement about its own release, and every † row is single-source by definition.

Scope. Language models and the flagship multimodal lines that carry the same brand and weights: Qwen3-VL, Qwen3-Omni, MiniMax-M3. Pure image, video and speech models are out of scope.

When the vendor’s page is client-rendered

Two of the labs whose releases I date most often publish announcements as a page that ships no text to a plain HTTP request. z.ai’s blog returns a 598-byte HTML shell that loads a JavaScript bundle; qwen.ai’s blog returns a shell that fetches its content after load. Both render fine in a browser, which is what a reader clicking the link sees.

For z.ai I did read something: the date string sits inside the page’s own bundle, so the bundle is where I checked GLM-4.5 (2025-07-28), GLM-4.6 (2025-09-30), GLM-4.7 (2025-12-22) and GLM-5 (2026-02-12). That is weaker evidence than a rendered page, and it is why GLM-5.2 stays out: its bundle contains 2026-06-16 and no other date, and a date visible only inside a build artifact is not one I will print as sourced.

Qwen’s older blog carries the full text and a date; the newer qwen.ai copies do not. So the three Qwen3-* rows dated from qwen.ai in the first pass now cite the weight repository and carry a †.

2023

Q1–Q2

Model	Date	Parameters	Source
ChatGLM-6B	2023-03-13 `†`	6.2B	THUDM/chatglm-6b
Baichuan-7B	2023-06-13 `†`	7B	baichuan-inc/Baichuan-7B
ChatGLM2-6B	2023-06-24 `†`	`—`	THUDM/chatglm2-6b

Q3–Q4

Model	Date	Parameters	Source
Qwen-7B	2023-08-03 `†`	7B	Qwen/Qwen-7B-Chat
Baichuan 2	2023-09-19	7B, 13B	arXiv:2309.10305
ChatGLM3-6B	2023-10-25 `†`	`—`	THUDM/chatglm3-6b
Yi-34B	2023-11-01 `†`	34B	01-ai/Yi-34B
DeepSeek Coder	2023-11-01 `†`	1.3B–33B	deepseek-ai/deepseek-coder-33b-instruct
DeepSeek LLM	2023-11-29 `†`	7B, 67B	deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-LLM-67B-Chat

Baichuan 2 is the only 2023 row dated by a paper: arXiv:2309.10305 is dated 2023-09-19, while its weight repositories appear earlier, on 2023-08-30 †, so the paper is the single source for that date. The two ChatGLM cells are blank because their cards do not state a count: 6.2 billion is on the ChatGLM-6B card and not on the cards of its two successors, and copying it across is the habit that makes timelines of this kind drift.

2024

Q1

Model	Date	Parameters	Source
Qwen1.5	2024-02-04	0.5B–110B	Qwen blog

Qwen1.5 was in the dropped list in the first pass, because I looked for it on the new blog and found nothing readable. The old blog still carries the post, dated 2024-02-04, listing six sizes plus 110B.

Q2–Q3

Model	Date	Parameters	Source
DeepSeek-V2	2024-05-07	236B total, 21B active	arXiv:2405.04434
GLM-4-9B	2024-06-04 `†`	9B	zai-org/GLM-4-9B-Chat
Qwen2	2024-06-07	0.5B–72B	Qwen blog
Qwen2-VL	2024-08-29	2B, 7B, 72B	Qwen blog
DeepSeek-V2.5	2024-09-05 `†`	`—`	deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V2.5
Qwen2.5	2024-09-19	0.5B–72B	Qwen blog

Q4

Model	Date	Parameters	Source
Hunyuan-Large	2024-10-22 `†`	389B total, 52B active	tencent/Hunyuan-Large
Qwen2.5-Coder	2024-11-06 `†`	0.5B–32B	Qwen/Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct
DeepSeek-V2.5-1210	2024-12-10	`—`	DeepSeek changelog
DeepSeek-V3	2024-12-26	671B total, 37B active	DeepSeek news

The DeepSeek point releases inside a model line are dated on DeepSeek’s own changelog, one page per release. Hunyuan-Large’s 389B/52B comes from arXiv:2411.02265, submitted 2024-11-04, three weeks after the weights appeared.

2025

Q1

Model	Date	Parameters	Source
MiniMax-Text-01	2025-01-14	456B total, 45.9B active	arXiv:2501.08313
DeepSeek-R1	2025-01-20	671B total, 37B active	DeepSeek news
Qwen2.5-VL	2025-01-27 `†`	3B, 7B, 72B	Qwen/Qwen2.5-VL-72B-Instruct
QwQ-32B	2025-03-06	32B	Qwen blog
DeepSeek-V3-0324	2025-03-25	671B total, 37B active	DeepSeek changelog

The two DeepSeek updates here do not restate a parameter count on their own changelog pages; the cells carry the count from the repositories that hold those weights, which are the V3 and R1 repositories listed above.

Q2

Model	Date	Parameters	Source
Qwen3	2025-04-29	0.6B–235B	Qwen blog
DeepSeek-R1-0528	2025-05-28	671B total, 37B active	DeepSeek changelog
MiniCPM4-8B	2025-06-05 `†`	8B	openbmb/MiniCPM4-8B
MiniMax-M1	2025-06-16	456B total, 45.9B active	arXiv:2506.13585
Hunyuan-A13B	2025-06-27	80B total, 13B active	Tencent-Hunyuan/Hunyuan-A13B
ERNIE 4.5	2025-06-30	0.3B–300B; flagship 300B/47B	ERNIE blog

Q3

Model	Date	Parameters	Source
Kimi K2	2025-07-11 `†`	1T total, 32B active	moonshotai/Kimi-K2-Instruct
Qwen3-Coder	2025-07-22	480B total, 35B active	Qwen blog
GLM-4.5	2025-07-28	355B total, 32B active	z.ai blog
Step-3	2025-07-31	321B total, 38B active	StepFun research
Seed-OSS-36B	2025-08-21	36B	ByteDance Seed blog
DeepSeek-V3.1	2025-08-21 `†`	`—`	deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.1
LongCat-Flash-Chat	2025-08-29 `†`	560B total, 18.6B–31.3B active	meituan-longcat/LongCat-Flash-Chat
Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B	2025-09-09 `†`	80B total, 3B active	Qwen/Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct
Ling-flash-2.0	2025-09-17 `†`	100B total, 6.1B active	inclusionAI/Ling-flash-2.0
Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B	2025-09-20 `†`	30B total, 3B active	Qwen/Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct
Qwen3-VL	2025-09-22 `†`	235B total, 22B active	Qwen/Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct
DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp	2025-09-29	`—`	DeepSeek news
GLM-4.6	2025-09-30	`—`	z.ai blog

Q4

Model	Date	Parameters	Source
Ling-1T	2025-10-02 `†`	1T total, 50B active	inclusionAI/Ling-1T
DeepSeek-OCR	2025-10-17 `†`	`—`	deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-OCR
LongCat-Flash-Omni	2025-10-23 `†`	560B total, 27B active	meituan-longcat/LongCat-Flash-Omni
MiniMax-M2	2025-10-27	230B total, 10B active	MiniMax blog
Kimi K2 Thinking	2025-11-04 `†`	`—`	moonshotai/Kimi-K2-Thinking
DeepSeek-V3.2	2025-12-01	`—`	DeepSeek news
GLM-4.7	2025-12-22	`—`	z.ai blog

2026

Q1

Model	Date	Parameters	Source
GLM-4.7-Flash	2026-01-19 `†`	30B total, 3B active	zai-org/GLM-4.7-Flash
Step-3.5-Flash	2026-02-01 `†`	196B total, 11B active	stepfun-ai/Step-3.5-Flash
MiniMax-M2.5	2026-02-12	`—`	MiniMax news
GLM-5	2026-02-12	744B total, 40B active	z.ai blog
Qwen3.5-397B-A17B	2026-02-16	397B total, 17B active	Alibaba press release

Q2

Model	Date	Parameters	Source
MiniMax-M2.7	2026-04-09 `†`	`—`	MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2.7
Kimi K2.6	2026-04-14 `†`	1T total, 32B active	moonshotai/Kimi-K2.6
DeepSeek-V4 (Pro and Flash)	2026-04-24	Pro 1.6T total / 49B active; Flash 284B total / 13B active	DeepSeek news
Step 3.7 Flash	2026-05-23 `†`	198B total, 11B active	stepfun-ai/Step-3.7-Flash
MiniMax-M3	2026-06-01	~428B total, ~23B active	MiniMax blog

The DeepSeek-V4 row now carries both counts; the Flash model’s 284B total is stated on the same announcement page as the Pro figures. Step 3.7 Flash moved to a † date: its GitHub repository has no releases, and the page I first cited carries a creation timestamp rather than a release date.

Q3

Model	Date	Parameters	Source
LongCat-2.0	2026-07-05 `†`	1.6T total, ~48B active	meituan-longcat/LongCat-2.0
Hunyuan Hy3	2026-07-06	295B total, 21B active	Tencent newsroom
Qwen3.8	2026-08-05 `†`	27B; 2.4T total / 95B active	Qwen/Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B
DeepSeek-V4-Pro GA	2026-08-13	1.6T total, 49B active	DeepSeek changelog
DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp	2026-08-21	`—`	DeepSeek changelog
DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash	2026-09-10	552B total; 8B active for input, 16B for output	DeepSeek changelog

Hy3 is the entry whose status changed in this revision. In the first pass I dropped it because the page I found did not say whether weights were published. It does: Hy3 is open-sourced under Apache 2.0 with weights on Hugging Face, and Tencent’s newsroom names the parameter counts. The V4-Pro GA row repeats the count from the April preview announcement, because the GA page does not restate it. The Qwen3.8 row is dated by the repository of the 27B model, the first of the line to appear; the flagship 2.4T-A95B repository was created three days later, and Qwen’s own announcement page is one of the client-rendered ones described above.

Two rows elsewhere disagree with third-party timelines for the same reason: LongCat-2.0’s repository was created 2026-07-05 while secondary coverage puts its launch at the end of June, and DeepSeek-V4-Flash’s repository was created 2026-04-22, two days before the announcement page.

What changed in this revision

Seven rows were added and three cells changed, listed because the edit history is the point of a table like this:

Qwen1.5 promoted into 2024 Q1 (2024-02-04), after finding the dated post on the old Qwen blog.
Hunyuan Hy3 promoted into 2026 Q3 (2026-07-06). It was dropped in error.
Four DeepSeek point releases added: V2.5-1210 (2024-12-10), V3-0324 (2025-03-25), R1-0528 (2025-05-28) and V4-Pro GA (2026-08-13). All four are dated on DeepSeek’s own changelog, the same source as V3.2 and V3.2-Exp.
Qwen3.8 added (2026-08-05 †), which the first pass omitted entirely.
Two ChatGLM parameter cells blanked. The ChatGLM2-6B and ChatGLM3-6B cards do not state a count, so the cells are now —.
DeepSeek-V4-Flash gained its total. The row said “Flash 13B active” and dropped the 284B total, which the same page states.

Three rows changed source or date type for the same structural reason: the Qwen3-Next, Qwen3-Omni and Step 3.7 Flash rows now cite a weight repository with a †, because the pages cited in the first pass were either unreadable to a plain request or carried no release date.

How this table gets updated

The table is edited in place. Every quarter I re-read the vendor pages for the labs already listed, then check Hugging Face for new repositories under those organizations. A release enters the table when it has a date and a link; until then it sits in the dropped list, with the reason.

Two rules keep it stable: I do not replace a † date with a later one unless the vendor publishes its own dated page, and I do not remove a superseded row.

The current table has 67 entries. Twenty-three of them fall in the twelve months from October 2025 to October 2026. That is a count of this table and nothing more; it is not a claim about the field, because the table only holds releases I could date.

What I could not check

Eleven candidates were dropped, for these reasons:

Yi-1.5 (May 2024) — the weight repository (01-ai/Yi-1.5-34B) was created 2024-05-11 †, and I could not date the announcement itself.
InternLM2 and InternLM2.5 — the weight repositories (internlm/internlm2-7b, internlm/internlm2_5-7b-chat) look like renamed predecessors, so the creation timestamp does not mark the release.
MiniCPM 1 and 2 — same problem; the repository (openbmb/MiniCPM-2B-sft-bf16) is now a monorepo for a whole series.
Baichuan 3 and 4 — I could not find weight artifacts at all.
ERNIE 5.0 and ERNIE 5.1 — Baidu’s blog dates them 2026-02-06 and 2026-05-09 (ERNIE 5.0, ERNIE 5.1) and describes ERNIE 5.0 as a 2.4-trillion-parameter model, but I found no open-weight repository for either.
Kimi K3 — the model card (moonshotai/Kimi-K3) carries the full architecture table (2.8T total, 104B activated) and a license, but no release date. The repository timestamp is 2026-06-13 and secondary coverage says mid-July. I could not reconcile that.
Kimi K2.5 — same shape of problem: the weight repository timestamp (moonshotai/Kimi-K2.5) is 2026-01-01 while the launch is reported at the end of January.
GLM-5.2 — the post is client-rendered and the only date string in its bundle is 2026-06-16. I am not willing to print that as the release date.
DeepSeek-V3.1-Terminus — a mid-cycle rename with a 2025-09-22 † repository (deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.1-Terminus); including it would have double-counted the V3.1 line.
Qwen-Image-2.1 — a dated weight repository (Qwen/Qwen-Image-2.1, 2026-09-14 †) but an image model, outside this table’s scope by the rule stated at the top.
The Step-Audio line — the same, for speech. The repositories exist (stepfun-ai/Step-Audio-R1.1) and I did not date them, because they would need their own table with its own scope.

Three other limits on this table:

The † timestamps are preparation times, not launch times. A repository can be created days before the announcement, and from outside I cannot see whether weights were uploaded at once or in pieces. Where the gap is large I noted it above the table.
The dates are the vendor’s own. No release date here has been confirmed by a second source, and one link per release is deliberate: a vendor correcting itself is the signal worth keeping, and coverage repeating the vendor is not a second source.
License differences are not reflected. Apache-2.0, MIT and the vendor-specific licenses Kimi, MiniMax and LongCat ship under are not the same permission. Each row links to the page that states its license, and for Hy3 that page states Apache 2.0.

Container rates by route, and why the indices disagree

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two public indices cover the lanes I care about. Both publish weekly, both are free to read, and they disagree by several hundred dollars on lanes that carry the same name. This page keeps the readings, the date on each, and the reasons they differ. Where a number was not available, the bottom of the page says so.

Freightos Baltic Index, latest week

Values read from Freightos’ own route pages on 9 October 2026, in US dollars per 40-foot container (FEU). The pages did not all carry the same week: FBX03 and FBX11 showed a 9 October index date, FBX01 and FBX13 still showed 2 October. Hence the date in the cell.

Lane (FBX code)	Latest, dated as shown on the page	Week to 2 Oct (Freightos, 6 Oct 2026)	Year ago (Freightos, 8 Oct 2025)	Year-on-year
China/East Asia → US West Coast (FBX01)	8,322, 2 Oct 2026 (Freightos)	−1%	1,554	+436%
China/East Asia → US East Coast (FBX03)	9,606, 9 Oct 2026 (Freightos)	level	3,260	+195%
China/East Asia → North Europe (FBX11)	3,260, 9 Oct 2026 (Freightos)	−3%	1,925	+69%
China/East Asia → Mediterranean (FBX13)	3,555, 2 Oct 2026 (Freightos)	−2%	2,217	+60%

The FBX global composite ended week 40 at 3,341, unchanged from the start of the week (Baltic Exchange week 40 container report, 5 Oct 2026, read via a syndication of the same report at Hellenic Shipping News).

Drewry World Container Index, latest assessment

Drewry publishes on Thursdays and dates each assessment.

Lane (Drewry WCI)	8 Oct 2026 (Drewry)	9 Oct 2025 (Drewry’s dispatch, reproduced)	Year-on-year
WCI composite	4,351, −2%	1,651, −1%	+164%
Shanghai → Los Angeles	7,624, −3%	2,176, −1%	+250%
Shanghai → New York	10,220, −2%	3,189, level	+220%
Shanghai → Rotterdam	3,337, −2%	1,577, −2%	+112%
Shanghai → Genoa	3,696, level	1,793, −1%	+106%

Drewry’s own page carries only the current week, so the 2025 column comes from a feed that reproduces its weekly dispatch in full. That week was the seventeenth straight weekly decline and the lowest composite since January 2024. Drewry attributed the 8 October fall to the Golden Week lull and to more services returning to the Suez Canal.

Which index I use, and what each one measures

Freightos Baltic Index (FBX). Twelve lanes, 40-foot containers, created with the Baltic Exchange. The composite is a weighted average of the twelve route indexes; the weekly figure averages the five business days of the same week and publishes each Friday; rates are calculated at 06:00 UTC and published at 14:00 UTC. It describes the inputs as transaction data aggregated from its own rate platform rather than a survey, and calls FBX IOSCO-compliant and used for index-linked contracts on SGX and CME (FBX page, retrieved 9 Oct 2026).

The lane definitions matter more than the compliance claim. FBX01’s headline names Shanghai and Ningbo as key origins and Los Angeles and Chicago as key destinations (FBX01 page). The port list lower on that page is wider: Yantian, Hong Kong, Kobe, Busan, Singapore, Kaohsiung and Vung Tau as origins, plus Vancouver, Long Beach, Oakland, Seattle and Tacoma as destinations. Chicago is an inland rail move.

Drewry World Container Index (WCI). Eight East-West trades, 40-foot containers, assessed by Drewry’s analysts and published Thursdays. Drewry calls it a spot-market benchmark and says a wider product, Container Freight Rate Insight, covers 6,700 port pairs a month (Drewry WCI). Its Shanghai–Los Angeles lane is a port pair.

SCFI, which I do not republish. The Shanghai Containerized Freight Index is compiled by the Shanghai Shipping Exchange, whose pages reserve the content and prohibit reproduction or commercial use without permission. So no SCFI values appear here. Its published methodology is quotable from the exchange’s own FAQ and index description (FAQ, description, retrieved 9 Oct 2026):

Composite in points, base period 16 October 2009 at 1,000 points, covering 13 routes.
Unit is USD per TEU, except the two US routes, which are USD per FEU.
Base ports are narrow: Europe as Hamburg, Antwerp, Felixstowe, Le Havre; the Mediterranean as Barcelona, Valencia, Genoa, Naples; US West Coast as Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland; US East Coast as New York, Savannah, Norfolk, Charleston.
Surcharges are included as a published list (BAF/FAF, EBS/EBA, CAF/YAS, PSS, WRS, PCS and the SCS/SCF/PTF/PCC group). Terminal handling at both ends, the port facility security surcharge, inland on-carriage and the US customs declaration charge are excluded.
Rates are export CIF, CY to CY, reported by the exchange’s panel of liner companies, consignors and forwarders by 12:00 Beijing time on the publication date.

If you need SCFI figures, take them from the exchange, not from a page like this one.

Why two indices give different numbers for the same corridor

Compare my two tables. Asia–US West Coast is 8,322 on FBX01 for the week to 2 October against 7,624 on WCI Shanghai–Los Angeles for 8 October: a gap of 698 dollars, about 9%. On the East Coast the direction flips. FBX03 is 9,606 and WCI Shanghai–New York is 10,220, so the narrower-sounding index sits 614 dollars higher.

Six documented reasons produce gaps like that:

Destination scope. Freightos’ FBX01 headline names Chicago among its destinations. WCI’s lane ends at the port of Los Angeles. An inland rail leg is a real cost.

Origin scope. FBX01’s origin list covers eight East Asian ports, Shanghai among them. FBX03 names Houston as well as New York (FBX03 page). Houston has a different cost base from New York. A lane that mixes ports averages unlike things.

Unit. SCFI quotes USD per TEU on most routes, USD per FEU only on the US lanes. FBX and WCI quote USD per 40-foot box everywhere. Headlines rarely say which unit a number carries.

Surcharge treatment. SCFI publishes its inclusion list, quoted above. Freightos describes its inputs as rolling short-term FAK spot tariffs “and related surcharges”. I found one description of a Drewry benchmark saying it excludes origin terminal handling (Lloyd’s List), but it covers a Hong Kong–Los Angeles benchmark, not this lane. Two indices can differ simply because one carries a fuel or peak-season line and the other does not.

How the sample is made. SCFI’s figure is reported to the exchange by a panel to a deadline. Freightos’ figure is computed from transaction records on its own platform, which covers the forwarders and carriers using it. Drewry’s figure is an assessment by its analysts. Reported, observed and assessed are three different measurements of one market.

When it is measured. WCI is a Thursday assessment. FBX is a Friday average of that week’s five business days. In a week when the lane moves 5%, the two cannot land on the same number.

One more trap: take the number off the publisher’s own page and write down its vintage. For week 40 the Baltic Exchange report gives FBX01 at 8,319 and Freightos’ route page gives 8,322. For the composite the Baltic report gives 3,341 and Freightos’ FBX index page gives 3,344. Reprints and stale tickers carry that gap forward.

The index is not your quote

An index measures one slice of the ocean leg. A quotation is a sum of lines, and carriers publish new lines on their own schedules. Four examples from notices dated May to September 2026:

Peak season surcharge, Far East Asia to the US and Canada: USD 1,000 per 20-foot and USD 2,000 per 40/45-foot, effective 17 June 2026 (Maersk advisory, 18 May 2026). That line alone is about 24% of the current FBX01 value, and the rate table on the notice is headed “Non-SPOT booking”.
Panama Canal surcharge, Asia to US East Coast and Gulf: USD 149 per 20-foot, 297 per 40-foot, 376 per 45-foot from 12 September 2026, which MSC attributes to continuing draft restrictions at the canal (MSC advisory, 12 Aug 2026, reproduced there). CMA CGM posted a Panama Canal adjustment factor of USD 500 per TEU on the same corridor from 10 September 2026 (CMA CGM notice, August 2026, reproduced there). Two carriers, same route, two different units.
Heavy load surcharge: USD 400 per container on Far East Asia to the US East Coast once a 20-foot box passes 20 tonnes verified gross mass, or a 40-foot box 22 tonnes (Maersk advisory, 29 May 2026). Index values do not weigh anything.
Emissions surcharge: ONE’s Europe Environment Surcharge for 1 October to 31 December 2026 is USD 220 per 40-foot dry container from Asia/Oceania to Europe and USD 90 to the Mediterranean (ONE notice, 1 Sep 2026). The rule behind it is public: the EU emissions trading system covers 50% of emissions on voyages into or out of the EU and 100% intra-EU and at berth, with allowance surrender phased at 40% of 2024 emissions, 70% of 2025 emissions and 100% from 2027 (European Commission).

Drewry’s week 37 assessment put average waiting time at Shanghai at 78 hours, up from 65 in week 36 (its 17 Sep 2026 dispatch, reproduced). A trade publication counted 136 vessels waiting off Shanghai and Ningbo on 9 October 2026, almost 860,000 TEU (Daily Cargo News).

How this page gets updated

Two free pages cover the tables above: Freightos’ per-lane route pages, each printing a current FBX figure, and Drewry’s dated WCI update. Freightos says a CSV of FBX data is available on request from fbx@freightos.com; I have not asked for it.

Cadence. WCI lands on Thursday. FBX publishes each Friday as an average of that week’s five business days, and the Baltic Exchange’s weekly report summarises the same lanes. A Friday refresh can carry both.

Rules I follow when refreshing.

Every number gets its own as-of date in the cell. Never “this week”.
Never compare a Thursday assessment with a Friday weekly average, or a per-TEU figure with a per-FEU figure, without saying so.
A composite move is not a lane move. Check that your lane is one of the eight or twelve first.
Check surcharge notices dated after the index period before reading a falling index as a falling invoice.
None of this is a landed price. Ocean freight is one line of a cost that also carries terminal handling, documentation, local destination charges, drayage and duty.

What I could not check

Whether WCI’s eight lane values include or exclude specific surcharges. One description of a Drewry benchmark excludes origin terminal handling, but it covers a Hong Kong–Los Angeles benchmark, not this lane. Drewry publishes no complete inclusion list.
Whether the Maersk and MSC surcharge notices I quote are still in force. They say “until further notice”, and I did not check applicability lane by lane.
Whether the 9 October 2025 WCI lane values and the 17 September 2026 waiting times are on any Drewry-hosted page. Drewry’s page carries only the current assessment, so both come from feeds that reproduce its weekly dispatch. The Wayback Machine was offline while I worked.
Whether the 136-vessel, 860,000-TEU Shanghai and Ningbo queue figure has a primary source. I found it only in a trade publication, not in a port authority or terminal report.
The text of MSC’s and CMA CGM’s own advisory pages, and of the Baltic Exchange report. Those pages block scripted requests, so I read them through reproductions that quote them in full. I could not confirm the publication date on CMA CGM’s notice.
SCFI values for the current week, by choice. The exchange’s notice does not permit reproduction.
Asia-outbound FBX or WCI figures for South America or Middle East lanes; the FBX South America lanes are Europe-outbound.

八个城市的月支出，拆到每一项

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

常见的那种”某城市一个月花多少钱”的句子，信息量接近零。你不知道那个数包含什么，也不知道它是什么时候的数，更不知道它指的是市中心还是郊区、单间还是一居、含不含水电。

所以这篇东西按城市拆项。挑 8 个华人去得比较多的城市：多伦多、温哥华、纽约、洛杉矶、悉尼、墨尔本、东京、伦敦。每个月支出拆成 7 项，每一项后面跟来源和日期。

做完之后有一件事比数字本身更有用：同一座城市，不同来源给出的房租经常差一倍以上，而差的每一分钱都能查到出处。这篇东西主要的篇幅花在这上面。

口径先定下来

房租有三个互不相通的口径，混着用一定出错。

要价是挂牌价，房子还没租出去。成交是实际签下来的租约，通常低于要价。存量平均是所有在租房屋的平均，包括住了五年、租金还停在旧合同上的租客。第三个最低。

政府租金统计几乎都是第三种。它们不是”更真的数字”，只是口径写得更清楚。CMHC 的租赁市场调查口径下的平均租金只覆盖专门建来出租的公寓楼（公寓个人出租另有一份分列数据），和你在租房网站上刷到的那批房子不是同一批。

**Numbeo 是众包。**它的每个城市页面顶部有一行”最后更新”，我逐页记了下来：多伦多 10 月 6 日、温哥华 10 月 7 日、纽约 10 月 8 日、洛杉矶 10 月 8 日、悉尼 10 月 7 日、墨尔本 10 月 8 日、东京 10 月 2 日、伦敦 10 月 7 日。页面同时给出这座城市过去 12 个月的录入总量与填答人数（多伦多 2,003 笔、360 人；伦敦 2,036 笔、409 人），但每一项下面只有一个区间，分项笔数不给，填的人是谁也不公开。这件事在最后一节还要展开。

**我没有做汇率换算。**表格里的数字全部留在本币。原因也放在最后一节。

一、房租：同一座城市能给出三种答案

城市	要价 · 市中心一居	要价 · 市中心外一居	官方口径（性质、范围、时间）
多伦多	C$2,259 Numbeo, 2026-10-06	C$2,020 Numbeo, 2026-10-06	专建出租公寓平均租金：一居 C$1,761、全部户型 C$1,913；市中心 Zone 1 一居 C$2,042、全部户型 C$2,163 CMHC 2025 数据表, 2025 年 10 月调查
温哥华	C$2,507 Numbeo, 2026-10-07	C$2,154 Numbeo, 2026-10-07	专建出租公寓平均租金：一居 C$1,806、两居 C$2,363；空置率 3.7% CMHC 2025 数据表（报告页）, 2025 年 10 月调查
纽约	$4,447 Numbeo, 2026-10-08	$3,218 Numbeo, 2026-10-08	一居 FMR $2,655（40 分位、含公用事业）HUD FY2026 表，FY2026 原公告, 2025-08-22 发布
洛杉矶	$2,544 Numbeo, 2026-10-08	$2,413 Numbeo, 2026-10-08	一居 FMR $2,328（40 分位、含公用事业）HUD FY2026 修订表, 2026-04-21 发布、2026-05-21 生效
悉尼	A$3,616 Numbeo, 2026-10-07	A$2,504 Numbeo, 2026-10-07	1 房公寓新登记租约周租中位 A$819（≈月 A$3,549）；内环 A$775、中环 A$670、外环 A$580 NSW 2026 年 6 月季度租金表（报告页）, 2026 年 4–6 月
墨尔本	A$2,479 Numbeo, 2026-10-08	A$2,019 Numbeo, 2026-10-08	都会区新租约周租中位 A$580、全部户型维州租赁报告, 2025 年 9 月季度
东京	¥202,375 Numbeo, 2026-10-02	¥109,456 Numbeo, 2026-10-02	未核到官方同口径数字
伦敦	£2,150 Numbeo, 2026-10-07	£1,731 Numbeo, 2026-10-07	伦敦平均私人租金 £2,332/月，英国平均 £1,400/月 ONS, 2026-09-16 发布、数据到 2026 年 8 月

纽约这一行最能说明问题。HUD 的一居公平市场租金是 $2,655，Numbeo 的市中心一居要价是 $4,447。两个数都来自可查来源，差 1.7 倍。差的来源是口径：HUD 算的是”这套房子的租金大概是多少”——40 分位、标准质量单元、并且已经包含水电；Numbeo 算的是”现在挂牌的一居写多少钱”。看房的时候后者更接近你会遇到的报价，判断”这座城市的住房负担”的时候前者更稳定。

悉尼是表里唯一能直接检验要价和成交的地方。NSW 那份报告的原始数据是每季度新登记租约的债券记录，也就是实际成交，不是挂牌。1 房公寓在内环的周租中位是 A$775，外环 A$580，同一城市差了三分之一。市中心那一片（Sydney 市政区）单独列出来是 A$819。

伦敦的 £2,332 是”所有在租私人住宅的平均”，里面混着住了很多年的老合同，所以它比新签要价低是正常的。它同时是英格兰各地区里最高的，最低的东北部是 £788。

墨尔本那一格要注意时间。维州政府公开的最新一版租赁报告是 2025 年 9 月季度，到现在已经一年。这不是数字错，是发布节奏慢。想回答”这个月多少钱”，它答不了。

东京那一格我只有众包数字。我没找到覆盖东京都心、限定一居、并且基于成交价的官方序列，所以没有强行拼一个。

二、剩下的六项拼在一起

超市那栏是我自己算的：牛奶 1 升、鸡蛋 12 个、白吐司 1 磅、白米 1 磅、鸡胸 1 磅、牛腿肉 1 磅、苹果 1 磅、番茄 1 磅、土豆 1 磅、洋葱 1 磅，十项相加，数据来自各城市 Numbeo 页面。

城市	水电 + 网络	交通（月）	超市一篮	外食一顿	手机	医保
多伦多	C$172 + C$68 Numbeo, 2026-10-06	C$155.10 TTC, 2026-10-09 抓取	C$37.89 Numbeo, 2026-10-06	C$25.00 Numbeo, 2026-10-06	C$45.91 Numbeo, 2026-10-06	C$0 OHIP, 2026-10-09 抓取
温哥华	C$116 + C$74 Numbeo, 2026-10-07	C$117.20 TransLink, 2026-10-09 抓取	C$45.32 Numbeo, 2026-10-07	C$25.00 Numbeo, 2026-10-07	C$52.38 Numbeo, 2026-10-07	C$0，但新居民有等待期 BC MSP, 2026-06-04
纽约	$216 + $72 Numbeo, 2026-10-08	$151.67 MTA, 2026-10-09 抓取	$41.55 Numbeo, 2026-10-08	$26.50 Numbeo, 2026-10-08	$74.31 Numbeo, 2026-10-08	雇主保险：单人均年保费 $9,325、雇员年均自付 $1,440 KFF 2025, 2025-10-22 发布
洛杉矶	$282 + $80 Numbeo, 2026-10-08	$78.00 LA Metro, 2026-10-09 抓取	$37.56 Numbeo, 2026-10-08	$26.50 Numbeo, 2026-10-08	$77.50 Numbeo, 2026-10-08	同上 KFF 2025, 2025-10-22 发布
悉尼	A$316 + A$81 Numbeo, 2026-10-07	A$216.67 Transport for NSW, 2026-10-09 抓取	A$41.94 Numbeo, 2026-10-07	A$25.00 Numbeo, 2026-10-07	A$39.14 Numbeo, 2026-10-07	临时签证一般不在 Medicare 内 Services Australia, 2026-10-09 抓取
墨尔本	A$332 + A$81 Numbeo, 2026-10-08	A$102.60 维州政府公报, 2026-05-27 刊、2026-06-01 生效	A$41.21 Numbeo, 2026-10-08	A$25.00 Numbeo, 2026-10-08	A$39.82 Numbeo, 2026-10-08	同上 Services Australia, 2026-10-09 抓取
东京	¥23,449 + ¥4,795 Numbeo, 2026-10-02	¥10,000 Numbeo, 2026-10-02	¥4,114 Numbeo, 2026-10-02	¥1,200 Numbeo, 2026-10-02	¥3,436 Numbeo, 2026-10-02	国民健康保险，费率由市町村定厚生劳动省, 2026-10-09 抓取
伦敦	£281 + £31 Numbeo, 2026-10-07	£171.70 TfL, 2026 年价目表	£20.31 Numbeo, 2026-10-07	£20.00 Numbeo, 2026-10-07	£13.66 Numbeo, 2026-10-07	IHS £1,035/年 GOV.UK, 2026-10-09 抓取

水电那一格是 Numbeo 的”915 平方英尺公寓的基本水电”，包含电、暖气、冷气、水、垃圾费，不含网络，网络单列。915 平方英尺约 85 平方米，对一居室来说偏大，这是这一格的已知偏差。

拿几份官方价目表可以对一下：多伦多的时段电价从 2026 年 5 月 1 日起是低谷 9.8 分、中段 15.7 分、高峰 20.3 分每千瓦时，另有每 30 天 C$51.18 的配电固定费，以及几项同样按 30 天计的 rate rider 抵扣与附加 Toronto Hydro。温哥华所在的 BC 省自 2026 年 4 月 1 日起（Rate Schedule 1101 第 13 版）是每天 23.44 分的固定费，前 675 千瓦时每度 11.87 分，超出部分 14.08 分 BC Hydro 电价表。伦敦的能源价格上限在 2026 年 10 月 1 日到 12 月 31 日这一季是每年 £1,723（按直接扣款、英苏威平均用量计）Ofgem。

三、交通这一栏，众包数字落后了一个版本

交通是七项里差距最大的一栏，值得单拎出来。

城市	众包月票（Numbeo）	官方口径	差
多伦多	C$156.00 Numbeo, 2026-10-06	C$155.10：PRESTO／银行卡单程 C$3.30 × 47 次封顶 TTC, 2026-10-09 抓取	数值吻合；但 TTC 月票本身已在 2026-08-31 停售
温哥华	C$117.10 Numbeo, 2026-10-07	C$117.20：一区成人月票 TransLink, 2026-10-09 抓取	基本吻合
纽约	$140.00 Numbeo, 2026-10-08	$151.67：OMNY 7 天 $35 封顶 × 52/12 MTA, 2026-10-09 抓取	众包更接近已停售的 30 天 MetroCard
洛杉矶	$105.00 Numbeo, 2026-10-08	$78.00：7 天 $18 封顶 × 52/12 LA Metro, 2026-10-09 抓取；EZ Transit 基础月票 $110 EZ 月票页, 2026-10-09 抓取	两套产品，众包更接近 EZ 月票
悉尼	A$217.39 Numbeo, 2026-10-07	A$216.67：成人周封顶 A$50 × 52/12 Transport for NSW, 2026-10-09 抓取	基本吻合
墨尔本	A$200.00 Numbeo, 2026-10-08	A$102.60：myki Pass 1+2 区每天 A$3.42 × 30 天维州政府公报, 2026-05-27 刊、2026-06-01 生效	众包约为官方两倍
东京	¥10,000	未核到可比的官方口径	—
伦敦	£186.00 Numbeo, 2026-10-07	£171.70：1–2 区月票 TfL 2026 年成人价目表	众包偏高 8%

纽约那一格最值得看。MTA 从 2026 年 1 月 1 日起停止出售和充值 MetroCard，主流付法只剩 OMNY，规则是同一张卡或设备在 7 天内刷满 $35 之后免费（含快速公交是 $67）。手上的旧卡还能把余额刷完，MTA 说停用也在 2026 年内，具体日期没公布。Numbeo 给的 $140 接近那个已经买不到的 30 天 MetroCard。一栏数据指向一个停售产品，页面本身看不出这个问题。

洛杉矶要分两个产品看。Metro 的票价页只有单程 $1.75、每天 $5、7 天 $18 三个封顶；月票是区域性的 EZ Transit Pass，基础款 $110，覆盖 23 家运营商，页面明文写着它不受封顶政策影响。Numbeo 的 $105 更接近 EZ 月票，不是封顶价，两个口径不能直接比。

墨尔本那一格方向相反，但幅度更大。维州政府公报 2026 年 5 月 27 日那一期的价目表写得很清楚：1+2 区 myki Pass 每天 A$3.42，7 天票 A$28.50。30 天差不多 A$102.60。众包给 A$200。

结论很直接：交通这一栏去交通局页面读，不要用汇总站。

四、医保本来就填不出一个数

这一栏前三个国家和后面三个国家不是同一种东西。

加拿大两个城市都是公费医疗，个人缴费为零。安大略从取消等待期之后，符合资格的人落地就能申请 OHIP。不列颠哥伦比亚的 MSP 也是公费，但新居民要等，政府页面写明”新到加拿大的人应尽快申请，保障可能从抵达不列颠哥伦比亚之日起三个月后开始”。这个差别对刚落地的几个月影响很大。

美国这一栏只能写保费。KFF 的 2025 年雇主保险调查：单人年保费平均 $9,325，家庭 $26,993；雇员年均自付部分，单人 $1,440，家庭 $6,850；有年度免赔额的计划里，单人免赔额平均 $1,886。这三个数要一起看，只看保费会低估自付。

澳洲这一栏是个资格问题，不是价格问题。Medicare 对公民、永久居民、以及部分被部长令覆盖的临时签证开放，大多数中国去的临时签证不在名单里，需要自购海外访客健康保险。官方发布的 OVHC 价格表我没有找到，所以那一格空着。

英国走预付：申请签证时缴移民健康附加费，多数类别每年 £1,035；学生及其家属、青年流动签证、申请时不满 18 岁的，每年 £776。缴完之后用 NHS 时基本不再付钱。

日本是按市町村分的国民健康保险，全国统一数字不存在，厚生劳动省发布的是制度说明，不是费率表。所以我写了制度，没写金额。

五、这些数字的坑

**汇率取数日。**欧洲央行 2026 年 10 月 8 日的参考汇率是：1 欧元 = 1.1186 美元 = 1.5953 加元 = 1.6110 澳元 = 0.84698 英镑 = 177.05 日元 ECB。换个日子，跨城市排序就会变。房租、交通、医保都是本币付的，所以我留在本币。作为参考，上面那篮子超市商品按 10 月 8 日的汇率折算，区间是 26 到 42 美元；本币面值看着跨度更大，是把汇率差异也算进去了。

**众包的样本问题。**第一，填的人不是随机抽样，愿意在物价网站上录数据的人本身有偏向。第二，页面只给城市级总量，具体到某一项有多少笔录入不公开，一笔和一千笔在页面上长得一样。第三，更新节奏由平台定，东京那一版停在 10 月 2 日。它适合判断量级，不适合当报价用。

**要价不等于成交。**悉尼是唯一能直接验证的地方，因为官方数据来自新登记的租约债券，就是实际签下来的价。众包的内环要价按周折算明显高于官方内环中位 A$775。这个差不会消失，它是挂牌和让价之间的差。

**官方统计也会滞后，而且会改。**维州的季度租金报告最新一版是 2025 年 9 月季度。发布慢不代表数字错，但它回答不了”这个月多少钱”。同理，CMHC 和 HUD 的数字都是一年前的调查或年报。HUD 这一版还在财年中间改过一次：洛杉矶的一居公平市场租金在 2026 年 4 月 21 日的修订公告里从 $2,085 上调到 $2,328 Federal Register。引用政府部门发布的数字，得连版本和修订一起引。

**口径混着用。**HUD 的 FMR 含公用事业，CMHC 的平均租金不含。Numbeo 的”基本水电”按 85 平方米算。Opal 的周封顶按自然周（周一到周日）走，本文折算月成本一律用 52/12 ≈ 4.3333 周，而不是 4 周。这几处如果不看原文，拼出来的”月支出”会同时偏高和偏低。

**月支出之外还有一次性的钱。**押金、中介费、日本常见的礼金和敷金、家具、签证和体检费。这一块我没有逐城核实，不给数字。

**同一栏混了不同资格状态。**医保那一列里，加拿大是本地居民、美国多数人是雇主保险、澳洲多数临时签证持有者要自购、英国是签证预付。把这些数字并排放会误导，所以我在表里只写了性质加一个可核的数字。

What I could not check

东京一居的官方租金。总务省的《住宅・土地統計調査》五年一次（最新为 2023 年调查），口径是在住住宅的居住状况，不是新签一居的成交租金 e-Stat 统计表入口。我没找到覆盖东京都心、限定一居、基于成交价的官方序列，表里那一格只有众包数字。
日本国民健康保险的金额。制度由厚生劳动省发布，费率由市町村定，我没有核到东京都内可比的数字。
澳洲临时签证的 OVHC 官方保费。没有找到官方发布的价格表。
OHIP 的覆盖范围。我只核到”已取消等待期”这一条，处方药和牙科是否覆盖没有核。
Numbeo 每一项的录入笔数，以及”市中心”的边界定义。页面公开的是城市级总量（多伦多 2,003 笔录入、360 人填答），分项笔数没有公开。
洛杉矶月票的生效日期。票价页只有单程 $1.75、每天 $5、7 天 $18 三个封顶，月票只有 EZ Transit Pass（基础款 $110），页面没有印价格的生效日，众包那个 $105 的口径我也没核到。
维州 2025 年 12 月到 2026 年 6 月这三个季度的租金数据是否已经产出。公开页面和往年报告列表都停在 2025 年 9 月季度，我确认的是”网站上没有”，不是”数据不存在”。
一次性开销（押金、中介费、礼金、家具）的逐城数字。整块没做。

Fifty Chinese radicals, ranked by frequency

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Search for “most common Chinese radicals” and you get the same page over and over: a list of ten, fifty or a hundred radicals, a meaning next to each, sometimes a mnemonic, occasionally a colour-coded poster. What you never get is a number. The order is asserted, not shown, so you cannot tell whether the third radical on the list is third because someone counted or because it looked tidy there.

This is that count. For each of the 214 Kangxi radicals I asked a machine-readable question: how many of the 1,000 most frequent Chinese characters are indexed under this radical, and how many of the 3,000. Then I did it a second way, against a different character list, to see whether the ranking survives.

It mostly does. The exceptions are the part worth reading.

What I counted

Piece	Source	Date on the source
Radical for each character	Unihan 18.0.0, `kRSUnicode` field in `Unihan_IRGSources.txt` (Unihan.zip)	files dated 2026-07-31
Character frequency order	Jun Da, Modern Chinese character frequency list (list, tab-delimited download)	data updated 2004-03-30
Second opinion character list	《现代汉语常用字表》 frequencies, 3,500 characters (Jun Da’s copy)	updated 2004-05-25
Radical stroke counts and names	Kangxi Radicals block, U+2F00–U+2FD5 (code chart); `kTotalStrokes` and `kMandarin` from the same Unihan release	2026-07-31

Short version of the method: read each character’s kRSUnicode value, take the integer before the decimal point, strip any apostrophe, and count the character under every radical it lists. The raw frequencies in Jun Da’s file sum to 193,504,018 character tokens, and the first 1,000 entries account for 89.14% of them.

The fifty, ranked

in 1,000 and in 3,000 are counts of characters, not tokens. The table is ranked by the 3,000 column, ties broken by the count in the second list and then by radical number. The examples column gives three characters under that radical, with their Jun Da rank.

#	Radical	Unicode name	Pinyin	Strokes	in 1,000	in 3,000	Examples (frequency rank)
1	口	Mouth	kǒu	3	50	160	和 (19), 可 (30), 后 (48)
2	手	Hand	shǒu	4	38	158	把 (110), 手 (143), 提 (196)
3	水	Water	shuǐ	4	37	153	法 (65), 没 (72), 海 (189)
4	人	Man	rén	2	55	131	人 (7), 他 (10), 们 (13)
5	木	Tree	mù	4	39	120	来 (15), 样 (88), 本 (92)
6	心	Heart	xīn	4	29	99	心 (90), 想 (99), 意 (104)
7	艸	Grass	cǎo	6	18	92	英 (371), 花 (410), 落 (496)
8	言	Speech	yán	7	33	76	说 (24), 话 (170), 论 (205)
9	糸	Silk	mì	6	23	70	经 (62), 给 (180), 系 (216)
10	辵	Walk	chuò	7	25	64	这 (11), 过 (46), 道 (52)
11	肉	Meat	ròu	6	11	62	能 (35), 育 (609), 脸 (615)
12	土	Earth	tǔ	3	17	61	在 (6), 地 (21), 场 (249)
13	女	Woman	nǚ	3	13	58	如 (67), 好 (82), 她 (91)
14	火	Fire	huǒ	4	11	52	然 (55), 点 (128), 火 (433)
15	日	Sun	rì	4	15	49	是 (3), 时 (25), 日 (101)
16	宀	Roof	mián	3	21	46	家 (56), 定 (77), 实 (100)
17	金	Gold	jīn	8	7	41	金 (260), 钱 (603), 错 (638)
18	貝	Shell	bèi	7	9	41	资 (257), 质 (404), 费 (486)
19	刀	Knife	dāo	2	19	39	到 (22), 分 (79), 前 (93)
20	阜	Mound	fù	8	17	34	队 (268), 院 (338), 际 (423)
21	目	Eye	mù	5	11	32	着 (41), 看 (76), 相 (152)
22	玉	Jade	yù	5	6	32	现 (70), 理 (89), 王 (299)
23	石	Stone	shí	5	4	31	确 (331), 石 (414), 研 (447)
24	一	One	yī	1	20	30	一 (2), 不 (4), 来 (15)
25	衣	Clothes	yī	6	6	29	被 (154), 表 (177), 装 (467)
26	竹	Bamboo	zhú	6	9	28	第 (114), 等 (158), 管 (252)
27	禾	Grain	hé	5	8	27	种 (57), 科 (277), 程 (314)
28	大	Big	dà	3	11	27	大 (17), 天 (78), 关 (127)
29	頁	Leaf	yè	9	10	27	题 (218), 领 (329), 须 (444)
30	犬	Dog	quǎn	4	3	25	状 (624), 独 (627), 犯 (767)
31	力	Power	lì	2	11	25	动 (73), 力 (106), 加 (166)
32	虫	Insect	chóng	6	1	24	虽 (504), 融 (1225), 虫 (1287)
33	广	Dotted Cliff	guǎng	3	9	24	应 (144), 度 (184), 府 (417)
34	足	Foot	zú	7	5	22	路 (305), 足 (527), 跟 (541)
35	巾	Turban	jīn	3	9	22	常 (187), 市 (254), 师 (333)
36	尸	Corpse	shī	3	8	22	展 (275), 局 (483), 尽 (488)
37	山	Mountain	shān	3	4	21	山 (259), 岁 (772), 岛 (798)
38	車	Cart	chē	7	6	21	车 (361), 转 (376), 轻 (460)
39	攴	Rap	pū	4	14	21	政 (150), 教 (191), 数 (231)
40	又	Again	yòu	2	13	20	对 (33), 发 (47), 又 (126)
41	馬	Horse	mǎ	10	2	19	马 (276), 验 (534), 驻 (1288)
42	示	Spirit	shì	5	8	19	神 (227), 社 (270), 示 (425)
43	八	Eight	bā	2	12	19	其 (85), 公 (115), 关 (127)
44	彳	Step	chì	3	8	18	得 (39), 很 (138), 德 (256)
45	田	Field	tián	5	8	18	由 (136), 电 (230), 界 (288)
46	冫	Ice	bīng	2	7	18	决 (273), 准 (379), 况 (419)
47	邑	City	yì	7	3	18	那 (38), 都 (68), 部 (84)
48	疒	Sickness	nè	5	3	17	病 (427), 痛 (730), 疗 (949)
49	門	Gate	mén	8	4	16	间 (135), 问 (137), 门 (185)
50	穴	Cave	xué	5	4	16	空 (272), 究 (429), 突 (484)

What the ranking actually says

The top five radicals account for 24.1% of the 3,000 entries, counting a character under every radical Unihan lists it under. The top twenty account for 53.5%. The top fifty for 76.5%. Beyond that the curve flattens hard: you need eighty radicals to reach 88.3%.

Nine of the 214 have no characters in the top 3,000 at all. They are 韭 leek, 髟 hair, 鬥 fight, 鬯 sacrificial wine, 鬲 cauldron, 鹵 salt, 黹 embroidery, 黽 frog and 龠 flute. Three are easy to explain. 鬯 is sacrificial wine and 黹 is embroidery, and neither topic turns up in a modern corpus often enough to register. 鬥 is the case where simplified writing stopped using the radical at all: the word for “fight” is now written 斗, and 斗 is indexed under radical 68, not 191.

Two entries in the table are worth pointing at because their numbers look wrong until you check the rule. 糸 silk, ninth largest grouping in the 3,000, is almost entirely there because of a simplification: 纟 is what the radical looks like in simplified characters like 经, 给, 结, 红 and 级, and Unihan marks it with an apostrophe on the radical number. Sixty-three of the seventy characters under 糸 carry that apostrophe. 攴 rap is the same story from the other direction. The form it takes on the right-hand side of a character is 攵, which CC-CEDICT records as a variant of 攴, and the fourteen characters it covers in the top 1,000 are 政, 教, 数, 放, 改, 收, 整, 敌, 效, 故, 攻, 敢, 散 and 救 — all of them far more common than the character 攴 itself, which is not in the top 3,000 at all.

The two lists disagree, and that is the interesting part

Ranking radicals by “how many of the 3,000 most frequent running-text characters” answers one question. Ranking by “how many of the 3,500 characters the Chinese education system says a literate adult needs” answers a different one, and I ran both.

The overall shape holds. Across the 205 radicals that occur in both lists, rank correlation is 0.98. Eighteen of the top twenty are the same twenty, and forty-seven of the top fifty.

The ones that move are the useful ones:

Radical	in 3,000 (Jun Da)	in 3,499 (常用字表)	What it means
虫 insect	24	61	Productive in the character list, rare character by character
竹 bamboo	28	46	Objects named in writing that rarely come up in it
刀 knife / 阜 mound	39 / 34	44 / 36	Fall out of the top twenty when the second list decides
米 rice / 鳥 bird / 食 eat	15 / 12 / 13	24 / 21 / 20	Enter the top fifty on the second list
示 spirit / 八 eight / 邑 city	19 / 19 / 18	18 / 17 / 16	Fall out of the top fifty as those three come in

虫 is the clearest case in the whole dataset. Sixty-one of the 3,499 official characters sit under it — dragonflies, shrimps, snails, moths, a long list of creatures most people recognise and rarely write. Only twenty-four of those sixty-one clear the top 3,000 by frequency. If you are building a memory deck from a list of radicals, 虫 looks important; if you are building one from a corpus, it is a rounding error. Both numbers are correct.

How the numbers were produced

The whole thing is one Python script over a handful of files, and the files are the part you have to pin down, because a radical count is only as stable as the radical assignment behind it.

Radical assignment. Unihan’s kRSUnicode gives, per character, a value like 85.5 — radical 85, five residual strokes. Some values carry apostrophes (120'.3), which per UAX #38 revision 40, dated 2026-04-23, mark a simplified form of the radical. Some characters have more than one value, space-separated; UAX #38 says this is deliberate, and exists “where there is sufficient ambiguity that a reasonable person might look for an ideograph in multiple places”. I counted such a character under every radical it lists.

The character universe. Jun Da’s list is ordered by frequency; I took the first 1,000 and the first 3,000 entries. Its raw-frequency column sums to 193,504,018, which I recomputed from the file rather than reading off the page. All 3,000 characters have a kRSUnicode value; nothing had to be dropped. The second list is Jun Da’s copy of 《现代汉语常用字表》, which parses to 3,499 characters rather than 3,500 — his own note on the page says the segmentation step failed on one character, 啰 — so the column headed “in 3,499” is a count against 3,499, not a typo.

Stroke counts. I took them from kTotalStrokes on the unified ideograph that each Kangxi radical character is equivalent to — U+2F27 KANGXI RADICAL ROOF is equivalent to U+5B80. UAX #38 says this equivalence is intended specifically so that kRSUnicode and kTotalStrokes can be derived for the radical characters, which is what I did.

Names and readings. From the Unicode character names (KANGXI RADICAL MOUTH, KANGXI RADICAL DOTTED CLIFF) and from kMandarin. I started with CC-CEDICT — the snapshot I pulled is dated 2026-10-08T08:19:21Z and holds 125,218 entries — and dropped it, because its first entry for 水 is “surname Shuǐ” and its first entry for 足 is jù, “excessive”. Both are real readings. Neither is the radical’s reading.

Where these numbers are soft

Multi-radical characters get counted twice. 38 of the top 1,000 and 77 of the top 3,000 have more than one kRSUnicode value, so the counts add up to slightly more than the number of characters in the list. The tie-break only matters at the boundary: four radicals sit at sixteen characters, so the last two places in the table above are a convention rather than a measurement. I checked the other rule as well: if each character is assigned only to its first-listed radical, the top twenty does not change at all, and the top fifty changes by one radical under the same tie-break — 又 drops out and 米 comes in.

Simplified and traditional characters are different data. 346 of the top 3,000 characters carry an apostrophe on their radical number, marking a simplified radical shape. Separately, 267 of the top 3,000 have a traditional variant indexed under a different radical. 来 is 75.3 (木) but 來 is 9.6 (人). 关 is 12.4 (八) but 關 is 169.11 (門). 业 is 1.4 (一) but 業 is 75.9 (木). 头 is 37.2 (大) but 頭 is 181.7 (頁). A frequency list of simplified text and a radical index built for the Kangxi dictionary will not agree, and the disagreement is systematic rather than random. Only 13 characters are in both groups, so the two effects stack rather than overlap. That 267 is an upper bound, not a count of errors: for some of those pairs the traditional character is a different word, so the radical change reflects a different word rather than a different indexing decision.

A radical is an index position, not a meaning. The three examples I show for 木 include 来, whose traditional form is indexed under 人. 关 is counted under 八. 虽 is counted under 虫, and it means “although”. 特 is counted under 牛, and it means “special” — the bull it once referred to is gone. 我, “I”, is indexed under 戈, a dagger-axe. 前 is indexed under 刀. Anyone who tells you the radical tells you the meaning is telling you something true often enough to be useful and false often enough to be dangerous. This dataset counts index positions.

One reading per radical. kMandarin gives a single customary reading. 广 is guǎng here; CC-CEDICT’s own entry for the character is yǎn, from “house on a cliff”, and I did not settle which reading a radical table should show.

What I could not check

Whether the Ministry of Education’s own radical standard would change the ranking. 《汉字部首表》 is published on moe.gov.cn (page dated 2005-06-28) as a scanned PDF, and I did not OCR it, so I cannot say how its radical list differs from the Kangxi 214 or whether it would move anything in the table above. I used the Kangxi set because Unihan encodes it. Not checked.
How the ranking behaves on traditional-character text. Jun Da’s list is the modern (simplified) one; his Classical Chinese list exists but I did not run it against the same pipeline. Unverified.
Whether the 2004 corpus behind the frequency order still represents written Chinese in 2026. I have no second modern corpus to compare against, and the 0.98 rank correlation above is between two different character sets drawn from the same corpus, so it is a check on the character list, not on the corpus. Single source.
Individual kRSUnicode assignments against any printed dictionary. I verified a handful by hand (来, 关, 虽, 业, 头, 特, 我) and left the rest as Unihan has them.

The script and the input files are small enough to rerun; the only thing that makes this table different from the other tables out there is that all of it is written down.

Measuring error in support AI, and what accuracy hides

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The way I test a support or ticketing system is against a task book, not a demo. The number people ask for afterwards is accuracy, and I have stopped handing that over on its own: on every realistic test set I have built, the average was the least informative thing in the results file.

What follows is the method I use now, plus a run on public data so the numbers can be checked.

Five failure modes, five different bills

A support model fails in at least five ways, and they do not cost the same.

Fabrication. The reply asserts something absent from the policy or the record: a fee that does not exist, a wrong refund window, an invented delivery date. This is what people call hallucination. The taxonomy I lean on, OlaBench, splits it into four sub-types — factual hallucination, misuse of retrieved results, relevance hallucination, and logical inconsistency (OlaBench, arXiv:2510.22143v3, §3.1; v1 25 Oct 2025, v3 25 May 2026, retrieved 9 Oct 2026). A sentence that reads well and is false costs money, and the cost usually arrives months later.

Missed detection. The ticket contains a legal threat, a regulator’s name, a safety issue or a fraud signal, and the system files it as routine. Nothing false was said. The failure is that no human ever reads it. On a scoring sheet this often counts as a correct classification, because the model did pick a queue that exists.

Misrouting. The reply is reasonable and the queue is wrong, so a differently-skilled team applies its own policy. The measurable cost is time to resolution and repeat contact.

Out-of-scope answers. The system answers a question it was never built for — tax, legal advice, another provider’s product. The content may be accurate. The exposure is regulatory.

Refusal. The system declines, loops, or hands off. There is no answer, so there is no error to score. This one gets tracked as a transfer or containment rate and drops out of the error count entirely.

Failure	What is wrong	Where the cost lands	Commonly reported as
Fabrication	the content	refunds, goodwill, disputes	hallucination rate
Missed detection	nothing	escalation, legal, safety	almost nothing
Misrouting	the destination	time to resolution, repeats	accuracy
Out of scope	the remit	compliance	rarely measured
Refusal	nothing	churn, containment	transfer rate

One accuracy figure blends these five at whatever ratio the sample happens to contain, and that ratio is set by whoever picked the sample.

What I ran

I needed a routing task with a ground-truth label and text a model would really see. Public complaint data has both.

The US CFPB publishes its Consumer Complaint Database under CC0 (CFPB Consumer Complaint Database, retrieved 9 Oct 2026); the search API’s own metadata reports 18,274,023 records, license CC0, last updated 2026-10-08 (API metadata, retrieved 9 Oct 2026).

The JSON search endpoint returns 15 fields and no narrative (field reference, retrieved 9 Oct 2026). That is new: the September 2026 release removed complaint narratives from the database (CFPB release notes, Release 24, September 2026). So I took the text from a Hugging Face mirror instead, BEE-spoke-data/consumer-finance-complaints (dataset card, CC0, mirror last modified 29 Dec 2025); its has-text config holds 1,689,573 rows (split sizes, retrieved 9 Oct 2026).

Task: read the narrative only, predict the product queue. Ground truth: the product label the CFPB publishes. I drew 3,894 complaints from it. The oldest is dated 2015-03-20, the newest 2024-01-04.

The label set changed under the data

The raw product field holds 17 distinct strings in this sample, and they are not 17 products. The date ranges are what give it away.

Product string as published	Rows	Received, first → last in this sample
Credit reporting, credit repair services, or other personal consumer reports	1,892	2017-04-24 → 2023-08-24
Debt collection	547	2015-03-20 → 2023-12-18
Credit card or prepaid card	267	2017-04-24 → 2023-08-21
Mortgage	248	2015-04-21 → 2023-11-02
Credit reporting or other personal consumer reports	245	2023-08-26 → 2024-01-04
Checking or savings account	195	2017-04-24 → 2023-11-21
Credit reporting	92	2015-04-17 → 2017-04-09
Student loan	85	2015-10-06 → 2023-11-13
Money transfer, virtual currency, or money service	79	2017-08-08 → 2023-11-13
Vehicle loan or lease	75	2017-04-24 → 2023-11-01
Credit card	68	2015-04-06 → 2023-12-22
Payday loan, title loan, or personal loan	41	2017-04-24 → 2023-06-20
Bank account or service	34	2015-04-04 → 2017-01-31
Consumer Loan	19	2015-03-25 → 2017-02-03
Payday loan	3	2015-10-08 → 2017-02-24
Money transfers	2	2015-07-17 → 2015-12-05
Payday loan, title loan, personal loan, or advance loan	2	2023-09-20 → 2023-10-06

Read the dates down the table. Bank account or service last appears here on 2017-01-31, and Checking or savings account first appears on 2017-04-24. Three more strings end in 2017 and their successors start the same year. The three credit-reporting strings sit end to end: 2015 to 2017, 2017 to 2023, 2023 into 2024. Same category, renamed.

I collapsed the 17 strings into 9 categories before scoring anything. The mapping is in the script, applied in one place rather than inferred per row. Without that step an accuracy compares a 2016 row and a 2023 row whose label sets do not line up, and the model gets credit or blame for the taxonomy.

The live database disagrees with the mirror about which names are current. Aggregated over complaints received in 2026, the CFPB API returns 11 product strings, with Credit card and Prepaid card listed separately and no Credit card or prepaid card at all (product aggregation, complaints received 2026-01-01 onward, retrieved 9 Oct 2026). I did not reconcile the two taxonomies.

Three ways one accuracy figure misleads

Imbalance. After collapsing, the sample looks like this:

Collapsed category	Rows	Share
Credit reporting	2,229	57.2%
Debt collection	547	14.0%
Credit card or prepaid card	335	8.6%
Mortgage	248	6.4%
Checking or savings account	229	5.9%
Student loan	85	2.2%
Money transfer or virtual currency	81	2.1%
Vehicle loan or lease	75	1.9%
Personal / payday / title loan	65	1.7%

A predictor that answers “credit reporting” for every ticket scores 0.572 here. That is a constant, and it sits close enough to a real model’s score to be mistaken for one.

Sample selection. Same data, same model, two splits:

Split	Test n	Accuracy	Macro F1	Credit-reporting share of test set
Random 60/40	1,558	0.756	0.428	57.1%
Chronological, split at 2022-04-21	1,560	0.832	0.377	74.0%

The chronological run scores 7.6 points higher while getting worse on most categories. The test set became more concentrated in the biggest class, and the dominant-class predictor rides that concentration up. Anyone reporting the 0.832 as an improvement after retraining would be reading their own sampling as progress.

Coverage. Sort the test set by the model’s confidence and score only the top slice:

Coverage	Tickets scored	Accuracy on that slice
100%	1,558	0.756
75%	1,168	0.854
50%	779	0.904
25%	389	0.900
10%	155	0.897

The 0.904 at half coverage is a real number computed on held-out data, and published alone it misdescribes the system by 15 points. Note where it stops moving: from 50% coverage down to 10%, accuracy drifts from 0.904 to 0.897, so the model’s confidence and its correctness come apart on the tail. That tail is where the misroutes are.

Underneath the average, the per-category picture on the random split:

Category	Test n	Recall	Precision
Credit reporting	889	0.879	0.886
Debt collection	225	0.631	0.637
Credit card or prepaid card	129	0.760	0.430
Mortgage	114	0.860	0.737
Checking or savings account	93	0.548	0.607
Money transfer or virtual currency	32	0.000	0.000
Student loan	29	0.276	0.889
Vehicle loan or lease	29	0.000	0.000
Personal / payday / title loan	18	0.000	0.000

Three categories are never once predicted correctly. Accuracy is 0.756. Macro F1 is 0.428. The distance between those two is the honest headline for this model.

Pulling the high-risk errors out of the average

The useful published idea here is OlaBench’s risk axis, Critical Business Risk Rate. It counts only responses that inappropriately assert one of four things, each a high-stakes failure that may trigger compliance exposure, user disputes or reputational damage: admitting platform liability (618 test cases), misidentifying the ICS role (228), overcommitting (138), and disparaging individuals or merchants (16) (OlaBench, arXiv:2510.22143v3, §3.1 and Table 1; 25 May 2026, retrieved 9 Oct 2026). It is reported as its own number, beside the hallucination rate.

The shape of that is what to copy: choose failures whose consequences differ in kind, count them separately, publish both, and never average them.

For the routing test I defined three tiers, and I chose them:

critical — a complaint about funds or account access (checking or savings, money transfer) lands in the reporting queue
material — a credit or loan dispute lands in a different loan or reporting family
routine — a misroute inside the same family

Tier	Random split	Chronological split
Critical	7 / 1,558 = 0.4%	11 / 1,560 = 0.7%
Material	43 / 1,558 = 2.8%	28 / 1,560 = 1.8%
Routine	330 / 1,558 = 21.2%	223 / 1,560 = 14.3%

The two splits swap places depending on which tier you read: the one with the prettier accuracy hides a critical error rate almost twice as high.

Published work also shows how far the same named metric can move when the population changes. The OlaBench paper reports a critical business risk rate of 8.7% for its OlaMind-Stage-2 model on the benchmark, and a critical business risk rate below 0.05% in daily manual annotation of live dialogues after launch (OlaBench, arXiv:2510.22143v3, §5.2 and Table 3; 25 May 2026, retrieved 9 Oct 2026). Both are the same metric, measured on different populations with different annotators. Quoting one without the other is a choice.

How these numbers were produced

Data. 3,894 complaints from a CC0 mirror of the CFPB Consumer Complaint Database (config has-text, 1,689,573 rows). The draw is 40 pages of 100 consecutive rows at random offsets in the split, deduplicated by complaint ID, seed 20261009. Rows with a narrative under 80 characters were dropped. It is a clustered draw, not an independent one.
Label hygiene. 17 published product strings collapsed to 9 categories using the date ranges in the table above. The mapping is written out in the script, not inferred per row.
Model. Multinomial naive Bayes over word unigrams and bigrams, Laplace smoothing α = 1, features seen at least twice in training. Python standard library only.
Splits. Random 60/40 with seed 7; chronological split at the 60th percentile of the received-date order, which lands on 2022-04-21.
Selective accuracy. Test rows sorted by the model’s maximum posterior probability, top k scored.
Every number in the tables above is printed by that one script over that sample.
Deliberate choice. No language model appears in this pipeline, including the scoring. A measurement instrument that is itself a model carries its own error, and OlaBench publishes the size of its own: its judge agrees with human annotators at 91.7% on risk identification and 82.6% on hallucination detection, over 5,000 human-annotated instances (OlaBench, arXiv:2510.22143v3, §3.3 and Table 2; 25 May 2026, retrieved 9 Oct 2026). A judge that disagrees with people 8% of the time on the risk axis puts a floor under everything else you can measure with it.

What I could not check

Whether the mirror’s product strings match the live database’s current taxonomy. The mirror’s rows use names the live API no longer returns for complaints received in 2026. I collapsed by date range and did not reconcile the two.
Whether the mirror is complete. Its files are timestamped December 2025 and the newest complaint in my 3,894-row sample is dated 2024-01-04. I did not verify whether later records exist in it.
Whether complaints published with a narrative are representative of all complaints. Narratives appeared only with consent, so every number above sits on that consenting subset.
Whether this sample’s class mix reflects the population. Credit reporting is 57.2% of the sample and about 82% of the live database: 14,978,722 of 18,274,023 records carry one of the three credit-reporting strings (product aggregation, retrieved 9 Oct 2026). Most of the gap is the mirror’s date cap.
How noisy the product label is. It is chosen by the consumer at submission, not assigned by an expert, and I treated it as ground truth because companies route on it. If it is noisy, my error rates are a floor, not a ceiling.
Whether a published tiering exists for complaint-routing consequences. I could not find one, so the three tiers are mine. The OlaBench categories are a different kind of thing: they score what a reply asserts about liability and commitment, and they do not classify misroutes.
Whether error rates vary with company size, state, or complaint age. A stratified rate is the next thing to compute.
The naive Bayes model is a floor. A trained transformer would score higher on the same task. The run was to see the shape of the error distribution, and a better model changes the level without changing the shape.

How the money actually moves in live commerce

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Plenty of English writing explains what a livestream checkout looks like. Almost none explains the middle: who takes what out of a completed order, out of which number, and how long the seller waits before the money is theirs.

I read platform rulebooks rather than marketing decks. They are dull, and they are the only place the arithmetic is written down.

What counts as a source here

Ranked: (1) rules published by the platform, with a date, because those move money; (2) help centres and developer docs restating them; (3) reported figures — press interviews, industry reports — fine for ranges, weak on precision; (4) “industry-common figure, unverified.”

Every number below carries a link and the date of the page I read it on. Where a page renders in a browser but not in a reader, I say so.

One structural problem runs through the chain. On the Chinese platforms the headline rate is often not in the rule text: the rule gives the formula, and the category rate sits in a separate annex or an in-product lookup.

The chain, in one pass

the buyer pays the platform;
the platform takes an order-level technical service fee;
the merchant pays a promotion fee (commission) to whoever drove the sale;
the platform takes a cut of that promotion fee too — a second fee, on the creator side;
the remainder goes to the agency, which splits it with the host by private contract;
separately, the merchant may have paid a slot fee up front, kept regardless of sales.

Two fees, two bases. Collapsing them is where most confusion starts.

Layer one: the platform’s cut

Platform	Charge	Rate	Base
Taobao	Seller base software service fee	0.6%, capped at ¥60 per sub-order (help centre, 2 June 2026)	Confirmed-receipt amount incl. shipping and platform subsidies
Taobao Live	Live software service fee	Receipts × category rate; rate in a separate annex (rule, eff. 31 Mar 2024)	Actual receipts, excl. shipping, coupons, refunds
Douyin	Merchant technical service fee	Settlement base × category rate (rule, eff. 30 Sept 2026)	Payment incl. shipping + host and platform coupons + payment subsidy
Douyin	Creator technical service fee	10% of the promotion fee; 20% at C grade, 40% at D, from 8 July 2026 (公示 notice, 2026)	The promotion fee itself
Kuaishou	Merchant technical service fee	Category rate, +0.4 points on credit or pay-later orders (资费一览表, 2 Sept 2026)	Payment incl. shipping + host and platform coupons
Kuaishou	Platform promotion service fee	10% of the host’s commission, currently waived (rule)	The commission

Dates matter as much as the numbers. Taobao’s fee applies to orders placed from 1 Sept 2024, annual confirmed sales up to ¥120,000 are refunded in full, and the ¥60 cap runs to 30 Nov 2026. The live fee rule was published 24 Mar 2024 (agreement, 11 Mar 2024).

The creator-side fee is a fee on a fee. The merchant pays, say, ¥20 of promotion fee, and the platform takes part of that ¥20 before host or agency sees anything. Douyin’s revised rule is explicit: the promotion fee is the base, and the band rate is 10% at grades A, B+ and B, 20% at C, 40% at D (Douyin 公示 notice on the 精选联盟 promotion-fee rule, 2026). Kuaishou publishes the same 10% on the host’s commission, and says it is currently waived (rule cited above).

The second feature is re-rating. Douyin ran a flat 10% for years, then replaced it in July 2026 with five grades, re-assessed every month from the previous month’s performance and applied to orders paid from the 9th to the 8th (公示 notice, 2026). The top grades get a rebate rather than a discount: A and B+ keep the 10% headline rate and receive a separate incentive payment, so their effective rate falls below 10%. That spread is wider than any merchant-side rate change I found.

Kuaishou shows how much these models differ historically. From 20 July 2019 it took 50% of the promoter’s actual commission on commission-bearing listings, and 5% of order value where none was attached (Beijing News, 1 July 2019).

Layer two: the fixed fee, then the commission

A 2020 reporting package put slot fees at tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of yuan, varying with host size, and commission at 20–30% of transaction value (Xinhua / Banyuetan, 10 July 2020). Press figures, no methodology — historical and single-source.

The commission rate is merchant-set inside platform limits. Taobao Live’s fee rule puts the ceiling at 80% with no published minimum (热浪引擎平台资费规则, effective 25 Feb 2022; reproduced in trade press only). Kuaishou allows 0%–90% (快分销结算规则). The plausible band is far narrower than either ceiling, but no rulebook says so.

Taobao Live also rebated the live fee in full for orders placed between 1 Sept 2024 and 31 Aug 2025 (report of the platform’s 2 Sept 2024 announcement, 3 Sept 2024), which is why the charge looks new and old at once.

Layer three: the agency and the host

The private contract is where sourcing runs out, but the platform-side splits are published.

Taobao Live takes 30% of the promotion fee from an agency-affiliated host and 40% from an individual one, so a signed host’s cut is already 70% or 60% before an agency acts (热浪引擎平台资费规则, effective 25 Feb 2022).
Douyin’s MCN rule states the same 10% platform cut, then divides the remainder into an agency share and a host share at whatever ratio the two agreed (Douyin 巨量百应 MCN 机构管理规范, undated page).
For scale: an industry association report counts 29,000 agencies in China as of May 2025 and puts the sector’s revenue at ¥63.6 billion, expected to pass ¥70 billion in 2025 (Economic Information Daily on the report, 30 June 2025).

Every “the agency takes 70%” claim I saw traces to a single undated explainer or a contract template. Industry-common figure, unverified.

When the money actually lands

Unsettled means paid but not yet matured; a refund can still reduce it. Settled means receipt is confirmed, the waiting period has run, fees are deducted, and the remainder sits in a balance (Kuaishou settlement rule, revision notice dated 7 Aug 2023).

Platform	Waiting period, from confirmation of receipt
Kuaishou	7 days at the top service-score tier, 15 days in the middle band, 20 days at the bottom
Douyin	3 days for categories with an after-sales window of 30 days or less; 10 days for longer windows; 21 days for shops on the zero-deposit programme
Taobao	Fee deducted in real time at confirmation of receipt

Kuaishou’s 7 days is what its distribution rule states, but the settlement rule underneath is tiered by the host’s service score (cycles). Douyin’s spread replaced an older model keyed to probation status and experience score, and is now tied to the category’s after-sales window (细则, 7 Sept 2026). Creator commission rides on the merchant’s clock throughout. That spread is the point of a settlement period as a risk instrument.

The same chain on TikTok Shop

TikTok publishes this more cleanly, which makes it a useful yardstick.

	United States	United Kingdom	Singapore
Seller commission	6% referral fee from 1 Apr 2024; five jewellery sub-categories 5% from 31 Oct 2024	9% incl. VAT; electronics and selected beauty 5%	—
Settlement	31 / 8 / 5 / 1 days after delivery by tier; a 3.5+ or 4.0+ shop score unlocks the faster tiers	3 or 15 days after delivery for creator commission	1 / 3 / 8 / 15 days (express, accelerated, standard, extended); express needs a 4.5+ shop rating
Held back	Reserve on each delivered order for 30 days	—	—
Alternative	Daily Advance, up to 80% of shipped net sales the day after shipment, from a third-party financier	—	—
Refunds	Referral fee refunded minus a 20% admin fee, capped at $5 per SKU from 15 May 2025	Full return → full seller commission refunded	—

US: TikTok’s own referral fee, category rate, settlement tier, reserve and Daily Advance pages. UK: its commission fee policy and creator payout rules. Singapore: its settlement page.

TikTok’s creator-side formula is (product price excluding tax − seller discount) × commission rate, a narrower base than the merchant side: shipping and platform-funded discounts sit inside the seller’s referral base but not the creator’s (UK guidebook on financial statements). A refund reverses the creator’s commission before it pays, not after. That is one reason a host’s number and the platform’s settled number drift apart.

Returns: who eats the refund

Taobao. Refund after receipt: the fee does not come back. Before receipt: no fee. The help page’s own worked example is a ¥100 order settling at ¥99.40 (Taobao help centre, 2 June 2026).
Taobao Live. A partial refund recalculates the fee on the reduced amount. A full refund with no merchant fault returns the fee, unless the merchant was on a discount scheme. Offline refunds get nothing (Live software service fee agreement, 11 Mar 2024).
Douyin. A refund inside the after-sales window, after settlement, returns the fee proportionally. Outside the window, nothing (Douyin merchant technical service fee rule, 29 Sept 2026).
Kuaishou. The commission base is recomputed as the original amount minus what was refunded; if that goes negative, the base is zero (Kuaishou settlement rule).
TikTok. The seller’s commission returns minus the administration fee. The creator’s pays only after disputes, refunds or returns resolve, and its base already excludes them.
Host wages. A 2022 court report describes a company deducting refunds from a host’s pay after a livestream underperformed; without an agreement on that point, the court held the wages payable and ordered the ¥6,612 owed (People’s Daily legal report, 24 Nov 2022). Clawback from pay is a contract term, not a platform rule.

Commission on a refunded order is usually clawed back in a later period than the order itself, so month-by-month comparisons never tie out. Douyin’s mechanic is explicit: a 5% reserve is held back from the last 15 days of settled commission, and late refunds are drawn from it (公示 notice, 2026).

The waterfall, on one hypothetical ¥100 order

The ¥100 is arithmetic, not a published rate card. Only the percentages marked as sourced are sourced.

Buyer pays                                              ¥100.00
  − platform order-level fee    Douyin formula; rate table not opened
  − merchant-set promotion fee  20%  [2020 press: 20–30%]    ¥ 20.00
      − platform cut of the fee 10%  [Douyin; Kuaishou]      ¥  2.00
    = agency, then host                                      ¥ 18.00
        agency/host split       private contract, ratio not published
  + slot fee, up front          tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands
  − returns                     any refund inside the window rewrites the base
  = settled                     3–21 days after receipt (Douyin); 7+ (Kuaishou)

If the order comes back, the promotion-fee base drops and the platform’s cut with it. Whether the merchant-side fee returns depends on the platform and the refund window.

How I would check any of this

Open the rule, not the blog post. Rules carry an effective date and a revision history, and a rate quoted without one is a rumour with a number attached. When the rule says the rate is in an annex, the annex is the rate. When a rule page renders in a browser but returns nothing to a reader, say so.

What I could not check

The Taobao Live category rate table. The rule gives the formula and points to a separate annex, which would not open. The only rate I could tie to a source is the 3% charged on the pilot categories — one bags category and one jewellery sub-category — when the rule started. Wider ranges for the annex circulate in trade press; I could not trace one to a rule, so the pilot rate is all I state.
Douyin’s and Kuaishou’s merchant-side category rates. Both publish the formula, base and refund logic; both rate tables are in-product lookups. Kuaishou’s fee schedule page documents the +0.4-point adjustment but did not render its table.
The live 热浪引擎 fee rule page. The 80% ceiling and the 30%/40% platform cut come from rule text reproduced in trade press. The page on Taobao’s rule centre returned no rule text to me.
The Kuaishou distribution rule’s revision date. The page carries no visible date, so I cannot say when the 10% or the 0%–90% range last changed.
Any agency–host split percentage. No platform publishes one. Douyin’s MCN rule states the platform’s cut and leaves the split to agreement, which is the honest answer.
The 20–30% commission range and all slot-fee figures. Press reporting, 2020, historically specific, no methodology.
Platform GMV figures. One industry data service puts 2024 live-commerce transaction volume at ¥5.3256 trillion, up 8.31% (网经社, 9 June 2025). A report published the same period cites about ¥5.8 trillion for 2024 on a different definition (直播电商高质量发展报告, 2025). Industry estimates, not audited filings, and what counts as a livestream sale varies.
Return and refund rates. The commonly cited pair — women’s clothing at 50–60%, livestream women’s clothing above 80% — comes from a research unit and a research centre, reported by a national newspaper, not from platform disclosure (People’s Daily Overseas Edition, 17 July 2025).
Whether the ¥60 cap is still running when you read this. The help page says orders placed and confirmed up to 30 Nov 2026, and the page itself is dated 2 June 2026.

How an eval set is built, and why it rots

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

An eval set is an instrument. It has a purpose, a scoring rule, a calibration record and an expiry date. Treating it as a file you download is where the trouble starts: the file already made those decisions without writing them down.

What follows is the build document I would want for a set I have to defend six months from now. Each rule is traceable to a public source or marked as my practice.

Where the samples come from

Four sources, each importing a different bias.

Source	What you get	The bias it imports	Documented where
A public benchmark, reused	Comparability with published numbers	Contamination; a task choice someone else made	Sainz et al., 2023-10-27
Public administrative data	A real distribution, a public licence, dated updates	A sample of who reports, not of who is affected	CFPB, read 2026-10-09
Synthetic generation	Volume you can afford, labels you control	Generator artifacts in the surface form	Gururangan et al., ACL 2018
Your own production traffic	Items that match what you ship	A convenience sample that drifts with the product	Lipton et al., ICML 2018

Reuse. LiveBench’s authors state the problem in one sentence: test set contamination “can quickly render benchmarks obsolete” (LiveBench, v2 2025-04-18). Their answer was questions from recent competitions, arXiv papers and news, added monthly. LiveCodeBench did the same for code: 400 problems published between May 2023 and February 2024 (LiveCodeBench, arXiv v1 2024-03-12). A static benchmark decays without anyone editing it.

Administrative data. The CFPB complaint database is the best example I know. Its search API reported 18,274,023 records under a CC0 licence on 2026-10-09, with a last_updated of 2026-10-08 (CFPB complaint search API, read 2026-10-09). Complaints are published only after the company responds or after 15 days, whichever comes first, and complaints referred to other regulators, including depository institutions with less than $10 billion in assets, are not published (CFPB API docs, read 2026-10-09). The agency states that the database “is not a statistical sample of consumers’ experiences in the marketplace” (CFPB database page, read 2026-10-09). A random draw samples the people who complained and whose complaints survived publication, not the people who were harmed.

Synthetic. Gururangan et al. showed that a text classifier reading only the hypothesis, with the premise deleted, reached about 67% on SNLI and 53% on MultiNLI (Annotation Artifacts in NLI Data, ACL 2018). The label was recoverable from phrasing because the crowd workers followed a template. Every generator has one. My test: delete the part of the input meant to carry the answer, score again, and compare with the majority-class rate. If accuracy stays well above it, the set is partly measuring its own generator. (my practice)

Production sampling. This is the source I trust least and use most. It produces items that match what the system sees, and its composition changes when the product does. Label shift is the named version of that failure: the marginal p(y) moves while p(x|y) does not, measurable without test labels using Black Box Shift Estimation (Lipton et al., ICML 2018).

What counts as correct

The match rule is a parameter, and the same predictions score differently under each choice. Four conventions:

Convention	The rule, as the source writes it	Source
Exact match against any reference	Counts predictions that match any one ground truth answer exactly; punctuation and articles ignored	SQuAD, arXiv v3 2016-10-11
Partial credit against the best reference	F1 over bags of tokens, “the maximum F1 over all of the ground truth answers”, then averaged	SQuAD, arXiv v3 2016-10-11
A threshold on localisation	IoU thresholds `[.5:.05:.95]`, 10 of them; 101 recall thresholds; `maxDets` of 1, 10 and 100	cocoapi `cocoeval.py`, read 2026-10-09
A graded rubric with an exclusion flag	0–3 for how well specified the issue is; 0–3 for whether the tests are scoped to it; a separate 0/1 question for any other reason the sample should not be used; a 1–5 confidence rating	SWE-bench annotation instructions, undated

Three things this table taught me.

Say who the ceiling belongs to. In SQuAD the human number comes from the data: the second annotator’s answer is treated as the prediction, the rest as ground truth, and humans score 77.0 exact match and 86.8 F1 on the test set (SQuAD, arXiv v3 2016-10-11). A ceiling quoted without its rule says as much about the rule as about the task.

One published number can hide ten thresholds. COCO’s headline detection score averages over ten IoU thresholds, three detection budgets and a recall grid. A single figure without a named threshold is a claim nobody can re-check. Pick the threshold, publish it, keep it fixed across versions.

The exclusion question is the part people skip. SWE-bench Verified is 500 samples “verified to be non-problematic by our human annotators”, drawn from 1,699 randomly sampled items that 93 Python developers annotated, with the full annotation set and the rubric released alongside (OpenAI, updated 2025-02-24). The rubric’s last section asks, 0/1, whether there is any other reason not to use the sample. My handling of it, (my practice):

A closed list of exclusion reason codes, decided before annotation starts.
Two raters must agree before an item is dropped; one rater’s “unclear” is not an exemption.
The dropped item stays in the file with its reason code, so the exemption stays auditable.
The exemption rate is reported next to every result; if it moves between releases, the set changed even when the questions did not.

Ground truth built by pooling is biased by construction. Test collections are built by judging only a sample of documents. When the pool is small relative to the collection, the judgment set “can be biased in that they favor relevant documents that contain topic title words”, a bias that depends on collection size and not on the number of relevant documents (Buckley et al., NIST, 2007-07-17). In a modern eval, if your labels come from checking only what your current systems returned, the label set favours items phrased the way those systems phrase things. My rule: draw a random slice from outside the candidate pool. (my practice)

Whether the raters agree

Agreement is a property of the pair and the setup.

Krippendorff’s alpha is 1 − Do/De, and it accepts any number of coders and missing entries (Krippendorff, 2011-01-25). For two raters, Cohen’s kappa, with Landis and Koch’s 1977 bands (reproduced in an AHRQ report, 2010).

Here is why the setup has to travel with the number. First-turn results on MT-bench, in the paper’s two setups: S1 counts ties and inconsistent votes, S2 excludes ties (MT-Bench, v4 2023-12-24):

Pair (first turn)	S1, R = 33%	S2, R = 50%	Source
GPT-4 pairwise vs human expert	66% (n = 1,343)	85% (n = 859)	MT-Bench, v4 2023-12-24
GPT-4 single-answer vs human expert	60% (n = 1,280)	85% (n = 739)	MT-Bench, v4 2023-12-24
Human vs human	63% (n = 721)	81% (n = 479)	MT-Bench, v4 2023-12-24

The headline everyone quotes is 85% against 81% for human agreement (MT-Bench, v4 2023-12-24). The same table holds 66% for the same judge under the other tie rule. An agreement figure quoted without its setup is not comparable to anything.

Measure agreement per stratum, not pooled. ChaosNLI collected 464,500 annotations, 100 per example, over 3,113 SNLI and MNLI examples and 1,532 ANLI examples (Nie et al., 2020-10-08). Models are near-perfect where humans agree and “can barely beat a random guess” where they do not, and those low-agreement items are most of the errors. A pooled score mixes two measurement regimes whose mixing ratio changes as models improve.

Sizing. For an agreement study, start from the kappa minimum-sample-size tables (Bujang and Baharum, EBPH 14(2), 2017). For comparing two systems, use a power analysis: Miller gives the MDE formula and shows that raising answers per question from 1 to 10 moved the MDE from 13.2% to 7.5%; in his illustrative table, HumanEval’s 164 questions at a fictional 83.6% carry a standard error of 3.2% (Miller, 2024-11-01). If items arrive in groups, such as the same document or template, compute clustered standard errors (Miller, 2024-11-01, Table 4); on DROP they were 1.34 against 0.44 naive.

My rule: size the calibration slice for the agreement interval I need, the scoring slice for the effect I want to detect, and refuse to report a gap below the MDE. (my practice)

Why the set rots

Decay	Symptom	What I do
Contamination	One set improves while unrelated sets do not	Keep item dates and prompt hashes; treat a stale set as historical
Label shift	Scores move while the system did not	Estimate the label mix and re-weight or re-cut the slice
Taxonomy and rubric drift	The same question means something different	Version the labels; freeze the rubric text per set version
Saturation	Every system sits near the ceiling	Retire the set and say when

Contamination’s extent “is unknown, as it is not straightforward to measure”, and where it exists it overestimates performance (Sainz et al., 2023-10-27). I cannot audit training corpora, so I keep the dates and admit the exposure window.

Saturation is not a failure of the set: GLUE’s performance passed the level of non-expert humans, which is what prompted SuperGLUE (Wang et al., 2019-05-02). Benchmark choice is fragile on its own: swapping tasks can reorder methods even when the methods do not change (Dehghani et al., 2021-07-14). Both are reasons to keep more than one set.

Taxonomy drift has a public paper trail. The CFPB’s September 2026 release notes record that “consumers’ complaint narratives … have been removed from the database”; the June 2026 release removed “Consumer disputed” and “Consumer consent provided” from exports, long after those filters went away; the May 2023 release re-based the ZIP code field on 2019 census estimates (CFPB release notes, read 2026-10-09). A set built on those narratives became unmaintainable one month ago. The same page explains the general rule: the database shows “the consumer’s original products, sub-products, issues, and sub-issues selections consistent with the options available on the form at the time the consumer submitted the complaint” (CFPB database page, read 2026-10-09). Labels frozen at submission, against a taxonomy that keeps moving.

Keeping it maintainable

(my practice, with borrowed pieces named)

Version the set. Additions and exclusions get a version bump and a changelog line; never edit an item silently.
Two slices. A frozen slice for comparability, a rolling window for freshness. LiveCodeBench and LiveBench are public versions of the same idea.
Write the metadata down. A datasheet (Gebru et al., 2018, CACM 2021) or a Croissant record (2024-03-28), so the next person need not infer the collection process.
A desensitisation rule that is checkable. The CFPB’s ZIP rule is a good template: publish the 5-digit ZIP unless the census area has under 20,000 people, then 3 digits only if the wider area has more than 20,000, otherwise nothing (CFPB field reference, read 2026-10-09). A rule stated as a threshold can be re-run; “we removed personal information” cannot.
Watch the exemption rate. It is the leading indicator that the rubric stopped fitting the data.
State the blind spot in one line. SQuAD’s metrics ignore punctuation and articles; COCO’s headline averages ten thresholds. Both are fine as long as the limitation is on the label.
Plan the retirement. When a set saturates or its taxonomy moves, freeze it, date it, and build the next one from the same seed items.

What I could not check

How many SWE-bench samples were dropped to leave 500. The announcement gives the annotated total (1,699) and the rubric, not the drop count (OpenAI, updated 2025-02-24).
Whether any specific model saw any specific benchmark item. Sainz et al. state the extent is unknown; I have no method that resolves this, so I do not claim cleanliness.
The CFPB’s narrative scrubbing standard. The field is gone and the current field reference no longer documents it; I could not reach a dated scrubbing specification.
The CFPB’s historical consumer_consent_provided semantics. The export field and its filter are gone; I found the removal dates, not the values.
Krippendorff’s own minimum sample size for alpha. I have the kappa tables from Bujang and Baharum; I found no equivalent table for alpha.
The Landis and Koch bands at first hand. I read a reproduction of the 1977 table in a 2010 AHRQ report, not the original.
LiveCodeBench’s current item count. The 400 figure comes from the March 2024 paper; the platform’s live count may differ.
The OpenAI SWE-bench Verified page at first hand. The live page served an automated-client challenge when I read it; the same version is readable in an Internet Archive copy, and the annotation instruction PDF is undated.
The CFPB record count above is a live API value and changes daily. It was 18,274,023 when I read it on 2026-10-09.

回国与出国：两张官方手续索引

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

手续这件事，我只看发文机关自己的页面。中介的文章常常写得更清楚，可它什么时候跟着政策改，我验证不了；官方页面排版难看，但它一改我就能看见。

这一篇是索引。两条方向各一张表：回国要收尾的，出国要准备的。每行给四样东西——找哪个入口、带什么材料、链接、我打开页面的日期。我不复制原文。原文会改，我抄的那一版不会。

我能看清的部分到此为止。哪里没核到，正文里写出来，最后一节再列一遍。

一条算不算官方入口

规则只有一条：域名属于发文机关自己，或者属于该机关指定的办事系统。gov.cn、部委官网、部委统一建设的服务平台，都算。媒体和地方政府转载的政策全文不算一手，我只把它的链接当线索，回到原文再核一遍。

表里的每个日期，是我最后一次打开该页面的日期（2026-10-09）。时间数字只写官方页面上印着的。页面没写，我就不写。

这种写法有代价。我不知道窗口要排多久，不知道材料会不会被打回。那些属于办事体验，不在这张表里。我写的是查得到的那一层。

回国：收尾清单

事项	官方入口	关键材料	官方链接	最近核验日期
出入境记录查询	国家移民管理局政务服务平台；“移民局 12367” 小程序 / App	实名认证、人脸识别	s.nia.gov.cn/mps/main.html	2026-10-09
护照换发 / 补发	移民局政务服务平台”证件换补发网上申请”	16 周岁以上、试点城市户籍居民（国家工作人员、现役军人除外）	移民局便民措施（2024-05-06 起实施）	2026-10-09
学历学位认证	教育部留学服务中心网上服务大厅	实人认证（国家政务服务平台 App 人脸识别）；材料清单见服务大厅；360 元	认证流程；服务大厅	2026-10-09
认证时限与复核	同上	—	一般 10–20 个工作日；结果异议可 12 个月内申请复核	认证流程
落户	地方人社部门 / 公安户政；留服中心就业报到	按各地办法，各地不同	非京籍留学回国人员在京就业落户实施办法；上海市《留学回国人员申办上海常住户口实施细则》（沪人才规〔2025〕3 号，2025-12-01 施行）	2026-10-09
人事档案	留服中心留学存档；或户籍地公共就业和人才服务机构	学历学位认证书、成绩单、工作证明	档案管理；十部门《关于进一步做好留学人才回国服务工作的意见》（人社部发〔2024〕78 号，2024-11-07）	2026-10-09
养老保险关系转移	国家社会保险公共服务平台 / 掌上 12333 / 电子社保卡	在新就业地参保缴费后提出申请	国家社会保险公共服务平台；上海市人社局办理说明（2026-04-24）	2026-10-09
医保关系转移	国家医保服务平台	转出地 10 个工作日内转出，转入地 5 个工作日内转入	《基本医疗保险关系转移接续暂行办法》（医保办发〔2021〕43 号）；国家医保局办理说明（2025-05-29）	2026-10-09
公积金	全国住房公积金小程序；异地转移接续	回国就业属于转移接续，不是出境定居销户	中央国家机关住房资金管理中心：接入全国异地转移接续平台的通知（国机房资〔2017〕2 号，2017-06-06 发布）	2026-10-09
个税	国家税务总局	境外所得计税与抵免；年度汇算	财政部税务总局公告 2020 年第 3 号（2020-01-17）	2026-10-09
携带物品免税额度	国务院关税税则委员会（财政部关税司发布）；海关执行	居民旅客在境外获取、总值 5000 元以内的行李物品免税（《进境物品关税、增值税、消费税征收办法》第十一条）	税委会公告 2024 年第 11 号（2024-11-29 公布，2024-12-01 施行）	2026-10-09

表格里有几处容易卡住，我单独说。

认证要趁早，别等找到工作再办。 留服中心的认证流程页写的是”一般 10–20 个工作日”，还写明按国别分类管理时限（认证流程，2026-10-09 核）。落户、入职、考编多数要认证书原件或电子证照，所以它是一条卡住后面所有流程的线。

落户这件事没有全国统一入口。 北京走留服中心的实施办法，上海走市人才工作局的细则，别的地方各自发文。我能给的只是一句提醒：先查你要落的那座城市当年发的办法，再准备材料。表里两条链接只覆盖北京和上海。

从港澳进境的免税额度是另一个数。 自香港、澳门进境的年满 18 周岁居民旅客，携带在境外获取的个人合理自用行李物品总值在 12000 元以内免税放行；在设有进境免税店的口岸，还可以把免税店买的东西一起算进 15000 元以内（财政部海关总署税务总局公告 2024 年第 7 号，2024-06-27，2024-08-01 起推广至全部进境口岸）。这和表里那行 5000 元是两套口径，走哪个口岸看哪个数。

公积金要分清两件事。 回国就业是把账户转回来，走异地转移接续；只有出境定居、注销户口才是销户提取。我见过有人回国后按”出境定居”去申请，方向从一开始就是错的。

出国：准备清单

事项	官方入口	关键材料	官方链接	最近核验日期
护照	移民局政务服务平台；出入境窗口	身份证、符合要求的照片	办事指引：申请普通护照	2026-10-09
签证	目的地国家驻华使领馆官网	申请表、照片、邀请函或录取通知、在职与财力证明、保险	外国驻华使馆机构信息	2026-10-09
公证	住所地或户籍地公证处；中国法律服务网	身份证、户口簿、需公证的文书	中国法律服务网	2026-10-09
领事认证 / 附加证明书	外交部或受委托的地方外办	已办妥的涉外公证书	领事认证（附加证明书）；国内领事认证（附加证明书）申办须知及流程	2026-10-09
体检与疫苗	海关总署各国际旅行卫生保健中心（各中心各自受理）	《国际旅行健康检查证明书》《疫苗接种或预防措施国际证书》	海关总署（北京）国际旅行卫生保健中心：出境体检须知	2026-10-09
购汇	银行（外汇局指定系统）	本人有效身份证件；年度总额每人每年等值 5 万美元	个人外汇管理办法；《个人外汇管理办法实施细则》第二条（汇发〔2007〕1 号）	2026-10-09
携带外币现钞	外汇指定银行、外汇局	等值 5000 美元以内免《携带证》；5000 至 10000 美元须申领；原则上不得超过 10000 美元	携带外币现钞出入境管理暂行办法（汇发〔2003〕102 号，2003-09-01 施行）	2026-10-09
现钞申报	海关	人民币超 20000 元或外币折合超 5000 美元应书面申报、走红色通道	进出境行李物品监管办法第九条、第十条（署令第 276 号，2025-04-01 施行）；海关总署答复页（2023-11-27）	2026-10-09
行李与禁限物品	海关总署	依《禁止、限制进出境物品表》判断	禁止、限制进出境物品表（海关总署令第 43 号，1993-03-01 施行）；进出境行李物品监管办法（署令第 276 号，2025-04-01 施行）	2026-10-09
药品	海关；持处方	以自用、合理数量为限；麻醉药品和第一类精神药品凭医疗诊断书和本人身份证明，不超过单张处方最大用量	《药品进口管理办法》第三十九条（食品药品监管局、海关总署第 4 号令）；《麻醉药品和精神药品管理条例》第四十四条（国务院令第 442 号，2005-11-01 施行）	2026-10-09
手机号	运营商	停机保号，保留号码使用权	《电信服务规范》	2026-10-09
租房退租、水电结算	无官方入口	看合同条款	—	未核到

按顺序说几件事。

公证和认证是有先后的。 先办涉外公证书，再送外交部或地方外办办附加证明书或领事认证，最后可能还要趟目的地国驻华使领馆。《取消外国公文书认证要求的公约》2023 年 11 月 7 日起在中国生效实施，送往缔约国使用的文书走附加证明书这一步，不用再做”外交部门认证加使领馆认证”的双认证（国务院部门动态，2023-11-07）。送往非缔约国，还是老流程（中国领事服务网：国内领事认证（附加证明书）申办须知及流程，2026-10-09 核）。所以在跑公证处之前，先确定文书要送到哪个国家。

体检和疫苗要按对方要求倒排。 保健中心出的是《国际旅行健康检查证明书》和《疫苗接种或预防措施国际证书》（北京保健中心，2026-10-09 核）。有些国家要求指定机构出体检报告、指定疫苗，这些要求写在对方使领馆的签证页上，不在保健中心。保健中心的页面上也写着，办美国移民体检、赴澳大利亚、新西兰、加拿大、韩国的签证体检，要另行预约。

手机号是最容易漏的一项。 放进表里，是因为漏掉它的后果出现得晚：人在国外，验证码收不到，绑这个号的支付、银行、政务账号全要重来。表里那行入口只到《电信服务规范》，它规定暂停或停止服务要提前二十四小时通知用户，没规定号码保留多久。

退租和水电没有官方入口。 这一行我留了空。它是押金、违约金、水电燃气读数的结算，全部由合同和当地运营商的规矩决定，没有一份文件能替你兜住。

现金这条两条口径都在用。 人民币 20000 元是《中国人民银行决定调整国家货币出入境限额》的口径，外币 5000 美元申报线来自外汇局和海关总署的暂行办法。两个数字管的是两件事，别混在一个数上。

2026 年 9 月 15 日之后多了什么

《国务院关于出境入境管理的规定》（国令第 841 号）2026 年 7 月 22 日公布，2026 年 9 月 15 日起施行（中国政府网全文，2026-07-31 发布）。全文十九条，我逐条读过。与个人办手续直接相关的有这几处：

出境前的安全提醒会成为固定动作。 移民管理机构在受理证件申请和实施边防检查时，要提醒准备前往高风险国家或地区的人；对风险等级最高、或者严重危及人身安全案件突发高发的国家或地区，必要时应当劝阻前往（第二条，同上链接）。
申请事由必须真实合法，且要配合核实。 可以询问情况、要求出示材料，甚至提供电子数据；提供虚假材料或虚假陈述的，有权不予签发证件、不准出境入境。给别人出邀请函的单位和个人，要对邀请内容真实性负责（第三条）。
新增了几类不准出境的情形。 因骗取证件、非法出境入境被行政拘留的，自处罚执行完毕起 6 个月至 3 年内不准出境；在境外从事违法犯罪活动危害国家安全的，自回国之日起 6 个月至 3 年内不准出境；违反出口管制、技术进出口管理规定的，可以不准出境（第四条）。
决定不准出境要书面告知事实、理由、依据和救济途径，涉及国家安全、刑事侦查等情形可以例外（第六条）。
出入境中介纳入备案管理。 机构自设立之日起 15 日内向所在地移民管理机构备案，从业人员由机构办理；本规定施行前已在做这行的，施行之日起 90 日内补办。境外企业、机构不得在中国境内提供出入境中介服务（第七条、第八条）。这个 90 日的窗口从 2026-09-15 起算。
对中介列了六类禁止行为，包括发布虚假信息、夸大宣传、协助提供虚假材料、泄露或出售个人信息、超出备案范围、组织或协助跨境违法犯罪（第十条）。
罚款有了具体数额。 个人出具虚假邀请函件的，处 5000 元以上 1 万元以下罚款；单位处 1 万元以上 5 万元以下，对直接负责的主管人员和其他直接责任人员处 5000 元以上 1 万元以下（第十一条）。

有一条我想明确写出来：这十九条里，没有改海关的行李与免税标准，没有改外汇的购汇与携带现钞规则，也没有改社保、医保、公积金的转移接续办法。 通篇的规范对象是移民管理机构、签证机关和出入境中介。所以”2026 年 9 月 15 日新规”这句话，对回国办社保医保的人来说基本没有新增动作。

这只是我把全文十九条读完后的判断，不是官方解读。答记者问里提到的三个立法方向——出境安全风险防范、外国人入境管理、中介服务规范——也印证了这个范围（司法部、公安部、国家移民局答记者问，2026-07-31）。

What I could not check

手机号能保留多久。 我把《电信服务规范》全文过了一遍，网上流传的”欠费 30 日停机、停机 60 日终止、注销后 90 日冻结”里，只有”电话号码冻结时限最短为 90 日”有对应条文，在附录 1 里，管的是固定电话；移动电话停机保号能保留多久，全文没规定，运营商各自规则也不统一。这条保持未核实。
分国别的学历认证时限表和材料清单。 认证流程页写”一般 10–20 个工作日”，并指向一个分类时限链接和一个材料清单链接，这两个我实测都返回 404。表里只写页面正文那句，材料一栏改用服务大厅的材料栏目。
上海落户细则的条文正文。 我从上海市行政规范性文件数据库核到了文号（沪人才规〔2025〕3 号）、公布日期（2025-11-19）和施行日期（2025-12-01）；该页正文要展开才能读，我没有逐条读。
全国住房公积金的统一办事入口。 我核到的是一条中央国家机关住房资金管理中心的说明页，不是住建部的统一服务页。异地转移接续目前主要通过全国住房公积金小程序办理，我没有核到一个可以长期引用的官方页面。
购汇 5 万美元的现行原文页。 数字出自《个人外汇管理办法实施细则》第二条；《个人外汇管理办法》本身只写”年度总额管理”，数额交给实施细则定。我引用的是外汇局天津市分局挂出的”（已修改）“版，不是总局现行有效全文页。
保健中心的全国统一入口。 我没核到总览全国各地保健中心的官方页面，表里给的是海关总署（北京）保健中心。原来引的 ithc.cn 不是政府域名，按本文标准不算官方入口，已删。
《国际旅行健康检查证明书》的强制适用条件。 我在保健中心的页面上看到”凡申请出境居住 1 年以上的中国籍人员必须持有健康证明”这类表述，用的是旧《国境卫生检疫法实施细则》的条文号。现行法修订后条文顺序有变化，我没有核到现行有效的对应条款，所以表里只给保健中心的入口，没有把”必须”写进去。
目的地国家的签证要求。 表里只给入口，没有一个国家是我逐一核验过的。对方使领馆的页面随时在改，我不做二次搬运。
人民币 20000 元限额的一手文件。 我引的是海关总署答复页，该页对直连返回 412（反爬），我用搜索快照确认了标题与答复口径，没能亲手打开；人民银行那份公告的原文我也没找到。这一行只有海关答复页支撑，不是发文机关本站原文。
各地落户口径。 只覆盖北京、上海两地的公开发布页。其余城市我没有核。
本表的办事体验部分。 预约排队多久、材料被退回的比例、窗口的实际执行尺度，全部未核，也不在这张表的范围内。

From token prices to task prices: three jobs, seven APIs

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every vendor publishes a price per million tokens. Almost none publishes what a job costs; the number that decides whether a feature ships is left as arithmetic homework.

I did that arithmetic for three jobs, from first-party price lists read on 2026-10-09. The token counts are assumptions, not measurements, and they are written out below. The money is the vendor’s standard-tier list price, in USD.

The three jobs

Job 1, label 1,000 support messages. Each call sends a 400-token instruction block and a 120-token message, and asks for a 15-token answer. Billed per run: 520,000 input tokens, of which 400,000 are the instruction block sent 1,000 times, plus 15,000 output tokens.

Job 2, turn a 100,000-word draft into a structured summary. Google’s token guide says a token is about 4 characters and 100 tokens about 60-80 English words, putting 100,000 words at 125,000-167,000 tokens (Google token counting guide, read 2026-10-09). I used 140,000:

One shot: 140,000 tokens in, a 3,000-token structured summary out.
Map-reduce: 14 chunk calls of about 10,000 tokens each, 700 tokens of notes per chunk, then a 9,800-token reduce call. Totals: 149,800 in, 12,800 out.

Job 3, one round of tool-assisted bug fixing. Eight turns against a 20,000-token repository: system prompt, tool schemas, three files. The prompt grows about 2,500 tokens per turn as tool results come back, from 20,000 to 37,500. Cumulative billed input is 230,000 tokens, of which 192,500 are a re-sent prefix a cache can serve; output is 6,000 tokens including reasoning.

How I read the price lists

Five first-party pages, all read on 2026-10-09; the Gemini API page builds its tables client-side, so I read it in a browser.

OpenAI API pricing — standard tier
Anthropic pricing
Gemini API pricing — paid tier, introductory rates through 2026-12-31
DeepSeek Models & Pricing — off-peak column
xAI pricing

The rules I applied:

Standard tier only, unless a row says batch: the real-time tier.
Cache reads are billed at the published cached-input rate. Cache writes are billed where a vendor publishes a write price. OpenAI and Anthropic do: $2.50 per million tokens for the two frontier models here, $0.125 for the two small ones, on Anthropic’s 5-minute cache. Google, DeepSeek and xAI publish no write price, so I charged zero, which flatters those three in every cached row.
In the cached rows I charge a write for every input token that is not a cache read: 400 tokens in Job 1, 37,500 in Job 3.
Reasoning tokens are output tokens. OpenAI states they are billed as output tokens (OpenAI reasoning guide, read 2026-10-09). Gemini’s output price is quoted “including thinking tokens” and DeepSeek’s V4.1-Flash runs in thinking mode by default.
Tool and search fees sit outside the main table.
No prompt hits a long-context threshold; the prompt-length step that does apply, Anthropic’s 100,000-token rule, is below.
No aggregator site was used for any price.

What each job costs

Task	Model	Estimated cost	Assumptions	Price source (read 2026-10-09)
Job 1, no cache	gpt-6.1-sol	$1.19	standard tier; 520k in / 15k out	OpenAI
Job 1, no cache	gpt-6-luna	$0.060	standard tier; 520k in / 15k out	OpenAI
Job 1, no cache	Claude Sonnet 5.5	$1.19	standard tier; 520k in / 15k out	Anthropic
Job 1, no cache	Claude Haiku 5.5	$0.060	standard tier; 520k in / 15k out	Anthropic
Job 1, no cache	Gemini 3.8 Flash	$0.45	standard tier, introductory rate; 520k in / 15k out	Google
Job 1, no cache	DeepSeek V4.1-Flash	$0.087	off-peak window; 520k in / 15k out	DeepSeek
Job 1, no cache	Grok 4.7	$1.13	standard tier; 520k in / 15k out	xAI
Job 1, instructions cached	gpt-6.1-sol	$0.43	400k of input served from cache; one 400-token write	OpenAI
Job 1, instructions cached	gpt-6-luna	$0.024	400k of input served from cache; one 400-token write	OpenAI
Job 1, instructions cached	Claude Sonnet 5.5	$0.43	400k cached, 5-minute TTL and write	Anthropic
Job 1, instructions cached	Claude Haiku 5.5	$0.024	400k cached, prompts under 100k, 5-minute TTL	Anthropic
Job 1, instructions cached	Gemini 3.8 Flash	$0.18	400k of input served from cache, storage excluded	Google
Job 1, instructions cached	DeepSeek V4.1-Flash	$0.028	off-peak; cache hits free of a write fee	DeepSeek
Job 1, instructions cached	Grok 4.7	$0.53	400k of input served from cache	xAI
Job 2, one shot	gpt-6.1-sol	$0.31	140k in / 3k out, one call	OpenAI
Job 2, one shot	gpt-6-luna	$0.016	140k in / 3k out, one call	OpenAI
Job 2, one shot	Claude Sonnet 5.5	$0.31	140k in / 3k out, one call	Anthropic
Job 2, one shot	Claude Haiku 5.5	$0.078	140k in / 3k out, above the 100k step	Anthropic
Job 2, one shot	Gemini 3.8 Flash	$0.12	140k in / 3k out, one call	Google
Job 2, one shot	DeepSeek V4.1-Flash	$0.023	off-peak; 140k in / 3k out	DeepSeek
Job 2, one shot	Grok 4.7	$0.30	140k in / 3k out, under the 200k threshold	xAI
Job 2, map-reduce	gpt-6.1-sol	$0.43	14 chunk calls + 1 reduce call; 149.8k in / 12.8k out	OpenAI
Job 2, map-reduce	gpt-6-luna	$0.021	14 chunk calls + 1 reduce call	OpenAI
Job 2, map-reduce	Claude Sonnet 5.5	$0.43	14 chunk calls + 1 reduce call	Anthropic
Job 2, map-reduce	Claude Haiku 5.5	$0.11	15 calls, each prompt under 100k	Anthropic
Job 2, map-reduce	Gemini 3.8 Flash	$0.16	14 chunk calls + 1 reduce call	Google
Job 2, map-reduce	DeepSeek V4.1-Flash	$0.030	off-peak window, 15 calls	DeepSeek
Job 2, map-reduce	Grok 4.7	$0.38	14 chunk calls + 1 reduce call	xAI
Job 3, agent loop	gpt-6.1-sol	$0.25	8 turns; 230k in (192.5k read, 37.5k written) / 6k out	OpenAI
Job 3, agent loop	gpt-6-luna	$0.013	8 turns; 230k in (192.5k read, 37.5k written) / 6k out	OpenAI
Job 3, agent loop	Claude Sonnet 5.5	$0.25	8 turns; 192.5k reads and 37.5k 5-minute writes / 6k out	Anthropic
Job 3, agent loop	Claude Haiku 5.5	$0.013	8 turns, every prompt under 100k	Anthropic
Job 3, agent loop	Gemini 3.8 Flash	$0.065	8 turns; 230k in (192.5k cached) / 6k out, storage excluded	Google
Job 3, agent loop	DeepSeek V4.1-Flash	$0.0098	off-peak window; 8 turns	DeepSeek
Job 3, agent loop	Grok 4.7	$0.21	8 turns; 230k in (192.5k cached) / 6k out	xAI

Two pairs of rows are identical on purpose. gpt-6.1-sol and Claude Sonnet 5.5 both list $2.00 per million input tokens, $10.00 output, $0.10 cached input and a $2.50 cache write (OpenAI pricing and Anthropic pricing, read 2026-10-09); gpt-6-luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 both list $0.10, $0.50, $0.01 and $0.125.

The same jobs with each vendor’s biggest discount

Batch is the biggest published discount: 50% on OpenAI (pricing page, read 2026-10-09), on Anthropic (“a 50% discount on both input and output tokens”, pricing page, read 2026-10-09) and on Google’s paid tier (“Batch API (50% cost reduction)”, pricing page, read 2026-10-09), where the Batch column halves the cached-input rate too. Not everywhere: xAI’s batch section gives 20% to grok-4.3 and the grok-4.20 variants and says unlisted models have no batch discount, which leaves Grok 4.7 at full price (xAI pricing, read 2026-10-09). DeepSeek publishes no batch tier.

Model	Job 1, cached	Job 2, one shot	Job 3, loop	Batch discount	Price source (read 2026-10-09)
gpt-6.1-sol	$0.22	$0.16	$0.12	50%	OpenAI
gpt-6-luna	$0.012	$0.0078	$0.0067	50%	OpenAI
Claude Sonnet 5.5	$0.22	$0.16	$0.12	50%	Anthropic
Claude Haiku 5.5	$0.012	$0.039	$0.0067	50%	Anthropic
Gemini 3.8 Flash	$0.088	$0.058	$0.033	50%	Google
DeepSeek V4.1-Flash	$0.028	$0.023	$0.0098	none published	DeepSeek
Grok 4.7	$0.53	$0.30	$0.21	none	xAI

Claude Haiku 5.5’s one-shot cell is the outlier: batch brings it to $0.039, still three times its cached Job 1 of $0.012, because a 140,000-token prompt sits above the 100,000-token step (Anthropic pricing, read 2026-10-09).

What the numbers say

Every figure here is arithmetic on the rows above, whose rates are linked (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, xAI, read 2026-10-09).

Output tokens decide the bill at the frontier tier. In cached Job 1 on gpt-6.1-sol, $0.15 of the $0.43 is output (35%) and $0.04 is cached instruction tokens (9%).

The spread inside one vendor is bigger than the spread between vendors. Cached Job 1 is $0.024 on gpt-6-luna and Haiku 5.5, $0.43 on gpt-6.1-sol and Sonnet 5.5, $0.53 on Grok 4.7: 22x from dearest to cheapest, 18x between the cheap pair and the frontier pair. At the same tier, the vendor changes nothing.

The agent loop is the cheapest job here. Job 3 is $0.25 on gpt-6.1-sol against $0.31 for the one-shot summary and $1.19 for Job 1. On the small models the order flips: Haiku 5.5 pays $0.078 for the one-shot summary against $0.013 for the loop, because 140,000 tokens crosses its threshold and 230,000 over eight turns does not.

Map-reduce costs more than one shot. On the two $2/$10 models it is $0.43 against $0.31, and the gap is all output tokens, 12,800 against 3,000. Chunking buys reliability and pays for it in output.

The absolute numbers are small. The main table spans $0.0098 to $1.19; batch pulls the floor to $0.0067. At this scale, a cost problem is usually a volume problem.

The variables that break the conversion

Thresholds re-price the whole request. Claude Haiku 5.5 charges $0.10 and $0.50 per million input and output tokens up to 100,000 prompt tokens, and $0.50 and $2.50 above it; the length counts cache reads and writes, and each request is priced on its own (Anthropic pricing, read 2026-10-09). Job 2’s 140,000-token prompt pays the higher rate on everything: $0.078, against $0.016 under the cap. xAI applies long-context rates to all tokens in a request once the prompt passes 200,000, where Grok 4.7 costs $4.00 input, $1.00 cached input and $12.00 output instead of $2.00, $0.50 and $6.00 (xAI pricing, read 2026-10-09). Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview steps from $2.00 to $4.00 input per million above 200,000 tokens (Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform pricing, read 2026-10-09). OpenAI’s line is 272,000 input tokens, published in a column tooltip; above it gpt-6.1-sol’s input doubles to $4.00 and its output to $15.00 (OpenAI pricing, read 2026-10-09). All three jobs stay under every line; Job 2 is halfway to OpenAI’s.

Tokenizer differences. Anthropic notes that Claude 4.7 and later use a tokenizer that “produces approximately 30% more tokens for the same text” (Anthropic pricing, read 2026-10-09). A comparison built on one words-per-token ratio, as mine is, is off by that much for Anthropic.

Time of day. DeepSeek’s peak hours are 01:00-04:00 and 06:00-10:00 UTC, Monday to Friday, excluding Chinese public holidays; every other hour is off-peak at half price (DeepSeek Models & Pricing, read 2026-10-09). Job 1 uncached is $0.087 off-peak and $0.174 at peak. Off-peak is 133 of the week’s 168 hours.

Cache economics differ in shape as well as in rate. Anthropic’s cache hit is 10% of the input price on most models, 5% on Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5, 2.5% on Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1; writes cost 1.25x for five minutes and 2x for an hour, so a 5-minute cache pays for itself after one read (Anthropic pricing, read 2026-10-09). DeepSeek’s hit price is $0.003 per million against $0.15 for a miss (DeepSeek pricing, read 2026-10-09). Google charges no write fee but charges storage, $0.50 per million tokens per hour on Gemini 3.8 Flash through 2026-12-31 and $4.50 on Gemini 3.1 Pro (Gemini pricing and Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform pricing, read 2026-10-09); a cached 140,000-token document runs $0.07 an hour on Flash and $0.63 on Pro.

Platform fees sit outside the token meter. OpenAI bills $2.50 per 1,000 tool calls and $10 per 1,000 web searches, so Job 3’s eight calls cost $0.02, and Anthropic’s tool-use prompt adds 286 to 675 tokens (OpenAI pricing and Anthropic pricing, read 2026-10-09). xAI bills X search per item fetched: $5 per 1,000 posts, $10 per 1,000 profiles (xAI pricing, read 2026-10-09).

Latency and geography carry multipliers. OpenAI’s Fast mode, renamed from Priority on 2026-07-30, is 2x, and data-residency endpoints add 10%; Gemini 3.8 Flash’s Priority tier is $1.35 input against $0.75 standard (OpenAI pricing and Gemini pricing, read 2026-10-09). xAI’s priority tier is 2x and its US regional endpoint 1.1x; Anthropic charges 1.1x for US-only inference; regional Bedrock and Google Cloud endpoints carry a 10% premium (xAI pricing and Anthropic pricing, read 2026-10-09).

The list price itself moves. Google quotes its Flash prices “through December 31, 2026” and doubles them on 2027-01-01: $0.75 to $1.50 input, $3.75 to $7.50 output, $0.075 to $0.15 cached input, $0.50 to $1.00 per million tokens per hour of cache storage (Gemini pricing, read 2026-10-09). Anthropic’s $2/$10 for Claude Sonnet 5 was launched as introductory pricing through 2026-08-31 and is now standard, with the rise to $3/$15 cancelled (Anthropic pricing, read 2026-10-09). OpenAI’s promotional pricing for GPT-5.6 Sol runs at least through 2026-11-21, on a model not in this table (OpenAI pricing, read 2026-10-09). Any per-task table is a snapshot with an expiry date.

What I could not check

I ran none of these three jobs. The token counts are stated assumptions, and a measured run would move every number here.
Cache-write pricing for Google, DeepSeek and xAI. I found no published write price for any of the three, so I charged zero. xAI’s prompt-caching page lists a billing rate per token type with no write line; Google’s context-caching price is a read rate plus hourly storage; DeepSeek’s table has only a hit price and a miss price. If any of them does charge for writes, its cached rows are too low.
Whether the Haiku 5.5 threshold behaves as written at the boundary. The page counts cache reads and writes in a prompt’s length, which would mean a cached 140,000-token document pays the higher rate. I did not test it.
Real token counts. I used Google’s words-per-token ratio across every vendor; Anthropic’s own note about a 30% tokenizer difference is a warning that this is approximate.
Volume, committed-use and negotiated enterprise pricing, free tiers and trial credits are outside this table. The price on the page is the list price.
Resale through cloud platforms. Anthropic bills Bedrock and Google Cloud in consumption units, and Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform prices are not the Gemini API prices: on 2026-10-09 the two pages disagreed on cache storage, $0.50 per million tokens per hour (Gemini pricing) against $1.00 for one model (Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform pricing). The route you buy through can change the number.

Incoterms in one page: who pays, who carries risk

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Most arguments I have had about a purchase order were arguments about one thing: the point at which the seller stops being responsible. Incoterms 2020 answers that in eleven three-letter terms (ICC, Incoterms 2020, retrieved 9 October 2026). Three letters are cheap to type onto a quotation and expensive to misread, so the map below is the one I keep next to the file.

It covers seven of the eleven rules. The four I leave out of the tables — FAS, CPT, CIP and DPU — are mentioned where they matter.

The cost and task map

Rule	Inland freight to the export port	Export customs	Main freight to destination	Cargo insurance	Import customs and duty
EXW Ex Works	Buyer	Buyer¹	Buyer	Buyer	Buyer
FCA Free Carrier	Buyer²	Seller	Buyer	Buyer	Buyer
FOB Free on Board	Seller	Seller	Buyer³	Buyer	Buyer
CFR Cost and Freight	Seller	Seller	Seller⁷	Buyer	Buyer
CIF Cost, Insurance and Freight	Seller	Seller	Seller⁷	Seller, minimum cover⁴	Buyer
DAP Delivered at Place	Seller	Seller	Seller	No insurance obligation on the seller⁵	Buyer
DDP Delivered Duty Paid	Seller	Seller	Seller	No insurance obligation on the seller⁵	Seller⁶

¹ EXW: the seller places the goods at the buyer’s disposal, not loaded onto any collecting vehicle, and does not clear them for export; where official documents are needed, it assists the buyer at the buyer’s risk and cost. (GOV.UK, Customs valuation: Incoterms; ICC Academy, FCA & EXW, retrieved 9 October 2026)

² FCA has two delivery points. At the seller’s premises the seller loads the goods onto the buyer’s collecting vehicle. At any other named place it delivers them to the buyer’s carrier, ready for unloading. Export clearance is the seller’s either way; import formalities are the buyer’s. (ICC Academy, FCA & EXW, retrieved 9 October 2026)

³ FOB: the buyer must contract the carrier and pay the transportation costs. (ICC Academy, FCA & FOB, retrieved 9 October 2026)

⁴ CIF keeps Institute Cargo Clauses (C) as its default level, the ICC’s minimum, with the option to agree more. CIP, the container-mode sibling, now requires cover compliant with Clauses (A). (ICC, Incoterms 2020 key changes; ICC Academy, CIF & CIP, retrieved 9 October 2026)

⁵ DAP and DDP place no insurance obligation on the seller. That does not mean the goods are uninsured; it means the rule does not require it, and silence is not cover. (ICC Academy, DAP & DDP, retrieved 9 October 2026)

⁶ DDP, in GOV.UK’s wording: the seller “must clear the products not only for export but also for import, to pay any duty for both export and import and to carry out all customs formalities.” (GOV.UK, retrieved 9 October 2026)

⁷ Rows that repeat a source: the buyer’s import formalities under EXW, FCA, FOB, CIF and DAP appear in the ICC Academy articles cited in notes 1–5; under the C rules the seller pays carriage to the destination port only, per GOV.UK’s CFR line. (retrieved 9 October 2026)

The same set, arranged by where risk moves. Read the CFR and CIF rows twice; the destination and the place of delivery are two different places.

Rule	Delivery happens, and risk passes, when the goods are…
EXW	placed at the buyer’s disposal at the named place, not loaded on any collecting vehicle
FCA	loaded onto the buyer’s collecting vehicle at the seller’s premises, or handed to the buyer’s carrier at another named place
FOB	loaded on board the vessel nominated by the buyer at the named port of shipment
CFR	loaded on board the vessel at the port of shipment
CIF	loaded on board the vessel at the port of shipment
DAP	at the buyer’s disposal at the named destination, still on the arriving vehicle, ready for unloading
DDP	at the buyer’s disposal at the named destination, cleared for import, ready for unloading

Sources, row by row: EXW and FCA from ICC Academy, FCA & EXW; FOB and CFR from GOV.UK and ICC Academy, FCA & FOB; CIF from ICC Academy, CIF & CIP; DAP and DDP from ICC Academy, DAP & DDP and GOV.UK. That a C-rule’s place of delivery is not its destination is ICC Academy, Place of delivery and risk transfer, whose worked example is CIF. All retrieved 9 October 2026.

Two more rows belong here. DPU (Delivered at Place Unloaded) is DAP with the unloading done by the seller; it is the renamed DAT, changed to make clear the destination can be any place, not only a terminal. CIP is CIF rebuilt for containers and air, with all-risk insurance and any-mode carriage. (ICC, Incoterms 2020 key changes; ICC Academy, DAP & DPU, retrieved 9 October 2026)

Choosing for a first small order

The choice is decided by three questions, and only the first one is about money.

Can you lodge the import declaration at the destination? If you can, or you have a broker who can, you have the whole field to choose from. If you cannot, you choose between a rule that puts import clearance on the seller (DDP) and appointing someone who can clear, which brings you back to the whole field.

How does the goods move? If they fly, or they travel in a container, FCA is the rule built for that path. FOB is written for goods loaded on a vessel at a port, and the ICC says FOB should not normally be used for container shipments because the seller loses control of the container at the port of export before it is loaded. FCA was revised in this edition so that the parties can agree the buyer will instruct the carrier to issue an on-board bill of lading to the seller — the document that made sellers cling to FOB in the first place. (ICC, Incoterms 2020 key changes; ICC Academy, Incoterms 2020 vs 2010, retrieved 9 October 2026)

Whose freight rate is better? If yours is, FCA or FOB keeps you as the one booking. If the seller’s is clearly better, CFR or CIF lets them book — and you accept that your risk starts at the loading port, which the CFR and CIF rows above make plain.

Three sketches, and what I would put on the order:

Situation	Rule I would use	Why
Samples or a first trial order by air, you can clear import yourself or through a courier acting for you	FCA at the seller’s premises	The seller loads and clears export; your carrier and your broker take it from the airport; the delivery point is one place you can verify
A small run by sea, your own forwarder, no need for the seller’s rate	FCA at the container terminal	Same split as above, and it sidesteps the container problem FOB carries
A low-value order, no importer registration at your end, and paying a broker a fixed fee would dwarf the shipment	DDP, after checking the seller can legally act as importer of record where you are	DDP is the only rule that moves import clearance onto the seller; the freight, duty and clearance all sit inside one number you cannot itemise

That last row is where judgement enters, so I will name it as judgement. The lower the shipment value, the harder it is to justify a broker’s minimum fee, and that asymmetry is why DDP quotes are common on small air shipments. That is my reading of the incentive, not a rule.

If your channel is a marketplace that quotes you a landed price, the question is already answered by someone else’s paperwork. My reading is that the platform is usually the importer of record, and its terms rather than your purchase order decide who clears. I have not tested that.

The five things people get wrong

Under FOB the buyer books the freight. The most common sentence I hear from a first-time buyer is that “the factory handles shipping under FOB.” FOB ends when the goods are on board the vessel. The buyer nominates the vessel, contracts the carrier and pays for the carriage, and the buyer clears import and pays duty. FOB is a shipping term the buyer has to operate. (ICC Academy, FCA & FOB; GOV.UK, retrieved 9 October 2026)

Under CIF and CFR, risk ends at the loading port. The name says “to the port of destination,” so a buyer reasonably reads the seller as responsible until the goods arrive. The ICC is explicit that in the C rules the place of delivery and the destination are not the same place, and risk passes when the goods are on board at the port of shipment. A CIF buyer owns the risk of the ocean crossing, and cannot claim against the seller if the ship goes down. (ICC Academy, Place of delivery and risk transfer; ICC Digital Library, retrieved 9 October 2026)

Under CIF the insurance is minimum cover. The seller must insure to Institute Cargo Clauses (C). That is not all risks. GOV.UK states the consequence plainly: “under CIF the seller is required to obtain insurance only on minimum cover,” so a buyer who wants more must agree it with the seller or arrange its own. (GOV.UK; ICC, Incoterms 2020 key changes, retrieved 9 October 2026)

DDP looks like the least work, and it is the heaviest term for the seller. Under DDP the seller owes an obligation it can only perform inside your country. The ICC’s own guidance flags this and says that if the seller does not want to manage import clearance, or is prevented by local rules from doing so, DAP is the more suitable rule. And freight, duty and clearance sit inside the DDP number, so it cannot be compared line by line with an FOB number. (ICC Academy, DAP & DDP, retrieved 9 October 2026)

EXW is a domestic-looking term. The seller does not clear export, and loading is the buyer’s risk and cost. For goods that will cross a border, the ICC’s guidance is to consider FCA instead. EXW survives in quotations mostly because it is the shortest thing to type. (ICC Academy, FCA & EXW; GOV.UK, retrieved 9 October 2026)

One correction that is not about any single rule: Incoterms do not decide who owns the goods, they do not set the payment method or its timing, and they are not the contract. They only become part of the contract when the contract says so, and they say nothing about the law that governs it. (ICC Digital Library, Incoterms and Commercial Contracts; trade.gov, Know Your Incoterms, retrieved 9 October 2026)

How I built the table

The normative text is ICC Publication 723, the book of the rules themselves (ICC Knowledge 2 Go, retrieved 9 October 2026). It is paid, and I did not buy it, so nothing above quotes a clause. Every cell is a free ICC summary of its rule — the ICC’s own Incoterms 2020 page and the ICC Academy rule articles, most of which carry an ICC-certified trainer’s byline — or a government restatement of the same rule. Where the ICC and a government page covered the same row, they agreed. That is a thin check.

The ICC also publishes an A4 chart setting out the obligations, costs and risks of both parties under each of the eleven rules on one page (ICC, Incoterms 2020 practical free wallchart, retrieved 9 October 2026). It is the closest thing to the sheet this article imitates, and the chart warns against using it without the rule book.

The footnotes carry the source for each row, so a reader who dislikes my table can go and disagree with the ICC.

What I could not check

The rules text itself. ICC Publication 723 costs money and I did not buy it. The lines above are the ICC’s summaries of its rules, not the clauses. Article numbers appear only where an ICC page names them, such as FCA’s A6/B6 and the consolidated costs article A9/B9 (ICC, Incoterms 2020 key changes, retrieved 9 October 2026).
Whether the wallchart matches my table. I read the chart’s headings and the ICC’s description of it, not every cell at print resolution. Where the two disagree, the chart is the ICC’s own and mine is a reading of it.
What a DDP price contains, tax by tax. The rule puts import clearance and duty on the seller, and the ICC’s DDP article lists tariffs and taxes among what the price covers. It is silent on value-added tax, GST and sales tax, whose treatment differs by jurisdiction and by whether the seller can recover it.
Whether a non-resident seller can be importer of record where you are. The ICC warns that local rules may prevent the seller from clearing import, and recommends DAP in that case. I found no per-country list, so the check is a question to ask, not a table to read.
Marketplace landed-price terms. My line about the platform being importer of record is my reading of how those quotes are built, not something I verified against a platform’s contract.
Broker minimum fees and typical DDP margins. No primary publisher I would cite. My argument that low-value shipments drift towards DDP is reasoning about incentives, and the sketches above are judgement, not data.
The four rules I did not tabulate. FAS, CPT, CIP and DPU are described in passing, not compared row by row.

One commodity, two customs records

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every trade flow of any size is counted twice: the exporting country files an export, the importing country files an import. Both are official, both are published, and they rarely agree. The gap is called mirror statistics.

I spent a day on one flow: lithium-ion accumulators, HS 8507.60, from China to the United States, 2021 to 2025, annual. In 2025 the two dollar values differ by 0.2%. The two weight figures differ by 378%.

The flow I picked

HS 8507.60 is lithium-ion accumulators. The EU’s equivalent line is CN 8507 60 00. China’s customs administration and the US Census Bureau each submit annual figures to UN Comtrade, which republishes them, so both sides of one flow can be pulled from a single free interface with no key. It caps you near one request per second, which I hit repeatedly. The annual path refuses monthly periods; monthly figures exist on a separate path.

The two records

Values in US dollars.

Year	US reports: imports from China	China reports: exports to the US	China minus US
2021	4,472,880,904	4,942,067,377	+10.5%
2022	9,295,203,389	10,140,436,891	+9.1%
2023	13,217,304,176	13,569,075,977	+2.7%
2024	16,457,945,481	15,336,139,169	−6.8%
2025	11,905,965,916	11,933,360,986	+0.2%

US figures from the UN Comtrade public preview, reporter 842, retrieved 2026-10-09. China figures from the same API, reporter 156, retrieved 2026-10-09.

Units are each reporter’s own count of items; weight is what each labels net weight, in kilograms.

Year	US units	China units	China minus US	US kg	China kg	China minus US
2021	270,958,533	335,557,842	+23.8%	200,042,198	193,291,709	−3%
2022	221,625,197	254,795,655	+15.0%	445,006,157	452,496,225	+2%
2023	169,387,306	224,161,539	+32.3%	927,840,085	654,443,183	−29%
2024	170,358,802	189,108,696	+11.0%	325,967,208	924,296,775	+184%
2025	172,030,704	210,204,008	+22.2%	196,843,537	940,998,916	+378%

Same two queries, retrieved 2026-10-09. The unit column is Comtrade’s quantity field, unit code 5, which its own reference file defines as u, number of items (reference file).

Three metrics, three verdicts

Money. The two published values sit within 11% of each other in every year, and the sign flips: China’s number is higher in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2025, lower in 2024. For a flow this size, that is agreement on either value basis.

Item counts. China reports more units in all five years, by 11% to 32%. The direction never flips, which makes it a different signal from the value gap: a persistent offset rather than noise. Both sides report the same unit, items, so the likely reading is that the two customs services are not counting the same object — a cell, a module, a pack, a battery with its housing. I cannot test that here.

Weight. Divide weight by units and the problem is plain. In 2025 China’s figures imply 4.48 kg per item; the US figures imply 1.14 kg per item. Both cannot describe the same shipment. The US weight series also contradicts itself: 445 million kg in 2022, 928 million kg in 2023, 326 million kg in 2024, 197 million kg in 2025 — 2.0, 5.5, 1.9 and 1.1 kg per item — while the unit count stays between 169 and 222 million. Comtrade marks the 2022 Chinese net weight and the 2024 US net weight as estimated, not reported.

There is a plausible mechanical reason I cannot prove from the data file. The Census Bureau’s guide says the only weight it publishes is shipping weight: gross weight including wrappings, crates and containers, and only for vessel and air shipments (Census guide, section 9, accessed 2026-10-09). That is my reading of the document, not something the trade record states.

Does the valuation rule explain it?

The standard first answer to a mirror gap is valuation. Exporters report FOB; importers usually report CIF, which adds freight and insurance to the destination port, so imports should exceed exports by a few percent.

The United States is an exception, and that is why I chose it as the mirror. US import value is customs value: the price actually paid or payable for the goods when sold for export to the United States, excluding US import duties, freight, insurance and other charges incurred in bringing them in (Census guide, section 6, accessed 2026-10-09). On paper that is the same basis as China’s FOB export value. The table above uses Comtrade’s published import value, though, which for the US is the CIF figure, so those charges are inside it. The same US record carries a second, FOB value, 1.2% to 2.0% lower in 2022–2025 and absent for 2021. On that customs basis the gap runs from −5.6% in 2024 to +11.3% in 2022.

The EU supplies the other case. Eurostat states that extra-EU imports are valued CIF and exports FOB, and that for imports the partner is the country of origin while for exports it is the country of final destination (Eurostat, International trade in goods, accessed 2026-10-09). The same batteries entering the EU should be recorded higher on the EU side.

Year	EU reports (CIF, EUR)	converted to USD	China reports (FOB, USD)	EU minus China	EU kg (net mass)	China kg	EU minus China
2021	6,488,838,350	7,674,349,117	8,917,616,897	−13.9%	218,033,088	310,006,083	−29.7%
2022	17,598,463,117	18,531,181,662	19,535,561,563	−5.1%	579,522,501	660,409,908	−12.2%
2023	23,259,741,834	25,150,758,845	23,354,336,657	+7.7%	813,302,239	791,298,476	+2.8%
2024	19,619,572,289	21,236,225,046	20,513,992,883	+3.5%	935,001,880	938,836,360	−0.4%
2025	25,650,086,052	28,984,597,239	29,272,424,192	−1.0%	1,522,030,924	1,655,915,264	−8.1%

EU values and net mass from the Eurostat Comext API, dataset DS-045409, data vintage 2026-09-15, retrieved 2026-10-09. China’s exports to the 27 member states from the UN Comtrade public preview, reporter 156, retrieved 2026-10-09; Comtrade’s preview returned nothing for its EU aggregate partner code, so I summed the 27 members. Currency conversion at the Eurostat annual average EUR/USD rate, dataset ert_bil_eur_a, retrieved 2026-10-09: 1.1827 for 2021, 1.0530 for 2022, 1.0813 for 2023, 1.0824 for 2024, 1.13 for 2025.

The CIF rule is real and points one way every year, but the gap does not follow it: after conversion the EU’s CIF figure sits below China’s FOB figure in three of the five years. The wedge is in the definitions, not in the numbers. My conversion is blunt too: an annual average over trade invoiced in several currencies, where a small freight margin can hide.

The weight columns here behave far better. In each of the last three years the EU’s net mass and China’s net weight agree within 8.1%, and in two of those within 3% — two customs systems, one net weight each, landing on nearly the same tonnage. That contrast is the strongest evidence in this piece that the US weight column is the odd one out. It is not evidence that anyone is cheating.

Two more explanations, one with a paper trail

Origin versus destination. China records an export against the destination the exporter declares. The United States records an import against the country of origin. A battery made in China, sold to a buyer in Singapore and forwarded to Texas, is a Chinese export to Singapore and later a US import from China. That mechanism pushes US imports above China’s exports. In my data the gap runs the other way in four years out of five, so at this level it is not the dominant term. Sizing it needs shipment-level data I do not have.

Classification. A Congressional Research Service report updated in November 2025 records that US exports of non-lead-acid battery parts to Mexico rose from $43 million in 2023 to $1.9 billion in 2024 while “Mexico’s import data do not show increases in battery part imports from the United States”. The report’s reading is “some HTS classification differences between the United States and Mexico” (CRS report R48538, version 8, updated 26 November 2025, accessed 2026-10-09). Two neighbours, one commodity, records that do not match, and the explanation offered is tariff lines.

The US tariff schedule now splits HS 8507.60 into statistical lines for batteries used as the primary power source in electric vehicles, for fully encased battery energy storage systems, and for everything else, with quantity reported in numbers and kilograms (USITC Harmonized Tariff Schedule, ch. 85, Revision 20 (2026), 8507.60, accessed 2026-10-09). HS6 8507.60 is a single number internationally, so a shift in the mix between those lines moves the weight per unit, the value per unit and the tariff treatment while leaving the HS6 comparison intact. The same report notes the code itself moved: US lithium-ion imports sat under HTS 8507.80.8010 from 2009 to 2011 and under 8507.60 from 2012.

The incentive I went looking for

A large tariff gives an importer a reason to declare less at the border than the goods are worth. If that were happening at scale, US import values would sit well below China’s export values, and the gap would widen after each tariff step. The steps are documented: lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles went to 25% for entries on or after 27 September 2024, and lithium-ion batteries for everything else go to 25% on 1 January 2026 (Federal Register 2024-21217, published 18 September 2024, accessed 2026-10-09).

In 2025, the first full year of the EV rate, US reported imports from China fell 27.7% to $11.91bn and China’s reported exports to the US fell 22.2% to $11.93bn. The records ended the year 0.2% apart, closer than any earlier year in the table. Both services agree on the direction and the rough size of the decline. I did not find a smuggling signature in the annual aggregates. That is not proof there is none: under-invoicing at both ends would cancel out, and I have no firm-level data.

Method

Commodity: HS 8507.60, lithium-ion accumulators excluding spent; CN 8507 60 00 in the EU nomenclature. Comtrade returns 2021 under classification code H5 and 2022–2025 under H6.
Reporters: China (Comtrade code 156) and the United States (842) for the China-to-US flow; China (156) and the 27 EU member states summed for the China-to-EU flow. Both flows 2021–2025, annual.
Fields: primaryValue in US dollars, qty with qtyUnitCode 5, netWgt in kilograms. Flow X for exports, M for imports. Partner 842 or 156, or the 27 member codes.
EU figures: Comext dataset DS-045409, reporter EU27_2020, partner CN, product 850760, flow 1 (imports), indicators VALUE_IN_EUROS and QUANTITY_IN_100KG, converted from hundreds of kilograms.
Currency: Eurostat annual average EUR/USD, dataset ert_bil_eur_a.
Retrieval 2026-10-09, China Standard Time. Comext vintage 2026-09-15; the exchange-rate table last updated 2026-07-08. Both APIs are free, keyless and rate-limited. 2025 is the most recent complete year and remains subject to revision.

What I could not check

China’s own portal, stats.customs.gov.cn, answers requests with HTTP 412. The Chinese figures here are what China submitted to UN Comtrade, not what its domestic tool shows today.
The Census Bureau’s trade API refuses requests without a key, so the US figures are Comtrade’s republication of the US submission, not the primary. USA Trade Online needs an account I do not have.
The US net weight for 2023, 927,840,085 kg, is inconsistent with the US’s own 2022 and 2024 values and with China’s 2023 value. I cannot tell which of those numbers is wrong.
Whether the US weight column is Census shipping weight. That is my inference from the definition, not a statement in the trade record.
Monthly timing. Monthly figures exist, but for this flow China’s monthly series stops at December 2024 in the preview, so the two records can be compared month by month only through 2024.
Whether the EU’s CIF figures would still sit below China’s FOB under a conversion matched to invoice currencies rather than an annual average.
Domestic production and consumption. Both records count only what crosses a border: a battery assembled in China for a Chinese factory appears in neither.

China's parcel count and the world's, side by side

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two numbers get quoted at each other in writing about parcel logistics: China’s express delivery volume from the State Post Bureau, and the world’s e-commerce parcel count from a market research firm. They get put in one sentence, divided, and turned into a percentage.

The division is not valid. This page shows why, and it is built to be updated once a year.

The numbers I was handed were 198.95 billion parcels for China in 2025, an estimated 121 billion e-commerce parcels worldwide, and a claim that China is about 60 percent of that. Both volumes trace to a source. The percentage does not.

The two anchor numbers, checked

China, 2025: 198.95 billion parcels (1,989.5亿件), up 13.6 percent on 2024 (State Post Bureau, 2026-01-22). It splits into 15.79 billion same-city, 178.94 billion inter-city, and 4.22 billion international plus Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan (same release); only the last crosses a border.

World, 2025: 121 billion business-to-consumer e-commerce parcels, up 10 percent (ECDB, 2025-12-15). The release is written as an expectation, published two weeks before the year it describes had ended, so it is a forecast rather than a count. The same article puts e-commerce at 63 percent of the total parcel market in 2025, which implies about 192 billion parcels of all kinds. The 192 is my division, not their number.

ECDB’s page says around 60 percent of global B2C e-commerce parcels originate in China, without printing a Chinese total. The 81 billion in circulation comes from a trade write-up of the same data (E-Commerce Germany News, 2026-01-09). 81 ÷ 121 = 67 percent. Same figures, same release cycle, two answers.

The two series do not count the same thing

The Chinese number counts items at acceptance, not on delivery. It covers enterprises holding an express business licence and their filed branches (State Post Bureau statistical survey system published by the National Bureau of Statistics, 2024-04-23), and excludes China Post’s own parcel business, stated beside the indicator name (State Post Bureau, 2024-01-22). The bureau defines handling volume (处理量) as business volume (业务量) plus delivery volume (投递量) (State Post Bureau, 2026-01-22), which puts the headline in the acceptance term. Business shipments, documents, samples and returns sit in the same count, with no weight ceiling. The 2024 bulletin records that some enterprises adjusted their reporting scope, and gives growth on a comparable basis (State Post Bureau, 2025-05-22).

The nearest thing to a world total used China’s number as its China column. The Pitney Bowes index measured business-to-business, business-to-consumer, consumer-to-business and consumer-consigned shipments up to 31.5 kg across thirteen markets (Pitney Bowes, 2023-08-09). For 2022 it put the world at 161 billion parcels and China at 110.6 billion in its report, rounded to 111 billion in the release. The State Post Bureau’s own figure for 2022 was 110.58 billion (State Post Bureau, 2023-01-18). The world total was partly assembled by inserting China’s administrative count, which is why China looks like a majority of “the world”.

ECDB counts one slice only. Business-to-consumer, and only where an online order is behind it. Its 81 billion for China therefore sits far below the bureau’s 198.95 billion.

The UPU counts postal operators only. Its State of the Postal Sector 2024 puts domestic parcel post above 40 billion items in 2024 (UPU, 2024-12-17). That is about a fifth of ECDB’s implied 192 billion, or a third of its 121 billion. Post offices and every licensed carrier are different populations.

The four global baselines are not from the same year: 40.2 billion (2024, postal operators), 121 billion (2025, e-commerce), 161 billion (2022, all parcels, thirteen markets), about 192 billion (my arithmetic, 2025).

Year by year: China

Every figure is the State Post Bureau’s express business volume (快递业务量), in billions of parcels.

Year	Parcels (bn)	Change	Source, date
2019	635.2	+25.3%	State Post Bureau statistical bulletin, 2020-05-19
2020	833.6	+31.2%	annual release, 2021-01-14
2021	1,083.0	+29.9%	annual release, 2022-01-14
2022	1,105.8	+2.1%	annual release, 2023-01-18
2023	1,320.7	+19.4%	statistical bulletin, 2024-05-10
2024	1,750.8	+21.5%	annual release, 2025-01-20
2025	1,989.5	+13.6%	annual release, 2026-01-22

One trap. On 2025-01-08 the national postal work conference put 2024 at 174.5 billion (State Post Bureau, 2025-01-08); twelve days later the bureau’s own release said 175.08 billion (State Post Bureau, 2025-01-20). The conference number comes from a speech; the release revises it.

Year by year: the world

The global column has two bases and neither covers every row.

Year	World, B2C e-commerce parcels (bn)	Source, date
2023	~100, my reconstruction	ECDB, 2025-12-15 plus arithmetic
2024	~110, my reconstruction	ECDB, 2025-12-15 plus arithmetic
2025	121	ECDB, 2025-12-15, single source

The reconstructions: ECDB states 121 billion for 2025 at 10 percent growth, and the write-up of the same data says 2024 grew at the same rate (E-Commerce Germany News, 2026-01-09). So 121 ÷ 1.1 = 110 and 110 ÷ 1.1 = 100, my divisions of stated growth rates; the 2024 rate rests on one second-hand sentence. Treat both rows as placeholders. The December 2025 article is the only parcel-market release from the firm I could reach, so I have nothing for 2019 through 2022.

For those years the only global series I could reach is the all-parcel one:

Year	World, all parcels (bn)	Source, date
2016	64	Pitney Bowes, 2023-08-09
2019	103.2	Pitney Bowes, 2020-10-12
2020	131.2	Pitney Bowes, 2021-09-28
2021	159	Pitney Bowes, 2022-09-22
2022	161	Pitney Bowes, 2023-08-09

That series stops at 2022 data. The editions since are United States only: the current one leads with 23.1 billion US parcels in 2025 (Pitney Bowes U.S. index, 2026 report, page read 2026-10-09). The past-reports list still names a 2024 global edition (Pitney Bowes past reports, page read 2026-10-09), but every release from 2024 onward that I could find describes US data. I cannot tell whether the global index was discontinued or paused.

Parcels per person, and the arithmetic

I divided the bureau’s volume by the National Bureau of Statistics’ year-end population for the same year.

2025: 198.95bn ÷ 1.40489bn = 141.6 parcels per person. Population 1,404.89 million at the end of 2025 (National Bureau of Statistics communiqué, 2026-02-28). The bureau publishes 141.6 for the same year (State Post Bureau, 2026-05-22), and its own note says the population denominator comes from that communiqué.
2024: 175.08bn ÷ 1.40828bn = 124.3 parcels per person. Population 1,408.28 million at the end of 2024 (National Bureau of Statistics communiqué, 2025-02-28). The bureau publishes 124.3 for that year (State Post Bureau, 2025-05-22).

Two caveats. The denominator includes infants, so this measures volume per head rather than what one person receives. The numerator is counted at acceptance, so a parcel is booked where it was posted.

From the e-commerce side it does not reconcile. The ECDB data puts China at 81 billion parcels for 2025 and says the average Chinese consumer receives around 120 a year (E-Commerce Germany News, 2026-01-09). 81 billion divided by 1.40489 billion people is 57.7. I cannot make 120 and 81 fit without knowing their population base and whether “consumer” is narrower than “person”.

Four honest versions of the claim:

E-commerce only: 81 ÷ 121 = 67 percent. ECDB’s own text says “around 60 percent” (ECDB, 2025-12-15), so even this is not clean, and the 81 comes from a write-up of the same data rather than from the release itself.
Share of growth, not of level. “More than 60 percent of global courier parcel growth in 2021–2025” — the official Chinese framing, carried in English by Xinhua on 2026-01-07 (Xinhua). It is about the five-year increase, not the level in any one year. Some of the 60 percent claims in circulation are this one quoted out of context.
Share of a Chinese official estimate of the world. The State Post Bureau’s development research centre put world volume in 2022 at about 189.2 billion items and forecast more than 200 billion for 2023, against China’s own count of 132 billion that year (Global Express Development Report 2023, released 2023-11-22, reported by the China Express Association on 2023-11-27). On its 2022 numbers China was 58 percent of the world. The report is not published online, so this reaches me through press coverage.
China’s express volume against ECDB’s world e-commerce volume: 198.95 ÷ 121 = 164 percent. Nonsense, and a useful test for whether a claim was built by dividing two unrelated columns.

The only defensible sentences name both sides of the ratio.

How I checked these numbers

Every number here is the publisher’s own, with a link and a date. Where a figure is not published — the 2023 and 2024 world rows, the 192 billion — I show the division behind it and say so. Where no first-hand source exists, the entry is marked single source or listed at the end.

How I will update this page

Third week of January. The year’s 邮政行业运行情况 goes up on spb.gov.cn between the 14th and the 22nd of the following month. Take the number, but expect it to move.
May. The full annual statistical bulletin. Quote that one once it exists, because January gets revised.
Late February. The year-end population in the National Bureau of Statistics communiqué. Use the same year’s figure for the per-person row.
Mid-December. ECDB’s parcel-market article, still labelled “expected to reach”.
June or July, and December. Pitney Bowes’ index: current editions are US only. The UPU’s Postal Statistics yearbook and State of the Postal Sector report are the postal-only series, useful as a floor.

What I could not check

ECDB’s own China total. Both figures sit in a trade write-up of ECDB data, not on the ECDB article I could read. Treated here as a single source.
The State Post Bureau’s indicator definition. I could not fetch a document defining 快递业务量 at indicator level. “Counted at acceptance” is inferred from the 业务量 + 投递量 = 处理量 identity and from the survey system’s description of who reports, which is weaker than reading the rule.
Any global e-commerce parcel series before 2023. The 2023 and 2024 e-commerce values here are reconstructions, and the growth rate behind them comes from a second-hand sentence.
The 60 versus 67 percent discrepancy inside ECDB, and the 120 versus 57.7 parcels-per-person discrepancy in the same data set. No methodology note found.
Whether Pitney Bowes’ global index is discontinued or paused. The site lists a 2024 global edition; every release I could find from 2024 onward is US-scope. Nothing states the change, so I am reading a gap.
The text of the Global Express Development Report 2023. It is not published online; the 189.2 billion figure reaches me through press coverage of the launch.
What share of China’s cross-border e-commerce volume sits outside the express count. The 4.22 billion international figure covers parcels accepted in the mainland by licensed express enterprises. Goods leaving as freight, via overseas warehouses, or as postal items outside that population are somewhere else, and nothing I found quantifies the gap.
The UPU’s 40 billion figure. It comes from a modelling exercise, not a summed country table, and I could not reach the underlying data.
A world per-person figure. It needs a world population denominator I have not verified, so I left it out.

What groceries cost in China, channel by channel

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The same pork carried three published prices in one Chinese city in February 2026: 8.14 yuan per 500 grams wholesale, 14.07 at the farm market, 15.03 at a chain supermarket counter. Vegetables that month ran 1.55 wholesale, 3.94 at a community vegetable shop and 4.52 in a supermarket, with no farm-market column published at all (a municipal development and reform commission bulletin, 2026-03-17).

That is the useful resolution. A single “China food price” averages five shops that are not substitutes, and the wholesale-to-retail gap is wider than the gap between retail channels.

Below: unit prices by channel where a source exists, three baskets, and why none of this is one figure.

The five channels

Early market (早市). Opens before dawn, gone by late morning, often selling produce that passed through wholesale hours earlier. In one district of a city in eastern China, thirty years of unlicensed roadside early markets were moved onto a managed lot that now runs around the clock: wholesale from about 01:00, retail through the day, a night market from the evening (Zhejiang Online, 2026-08-24).

Wet market (菜市场). The permanent covered market, and the channel the official price system actually samples: the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs monitors 500 county-level farm markets and collection points for its weekly livestock and egg series (MARA, 2026-01-13).

Neighbourhood and chain supermarkets. Two prices, not one. The February bulletin separates a community vegetable shop from a chain supermarket counter: 3.94 against 4.52 for vegetables, 14.07 against 15.03 for pork.

Warehouse clubs. Membership retail. Sam’s Club’s two tiers were 260 and 680 yuan a year, with 10.7 million paid members in China as of June 2026 (SCMP, 2026-09-02). Costco added a 688-yuan black-diamond tier paying a 3 percent rebate in April 2026, against a 299-yuan basic tier (Lianshang, via Sina Finance, 2026-04-22). Neither retailer’s membership page would load, so both are reported, not confirmed.

Fresh-grocery delivery. Pre-warehouse apps, about 30 minutes to your door. What is documented is the fees, not the item prices: one pilot charges 0.6 yuan base packaging plus 0.4 for insulated items, a second 0.5 plus 0.5, others 1.0 or 1.2 flat (Lanjing Finance, via East Money, 2026-08-19). One platform suspended self-pickup in several cities, some surviving pickup points added a 20-yuan minimum, and most cities charge 3 to 5 yuan below a free-delivery threshold of 35 to 39 yuan (Jiemian, via Securities Times, 2026-04-27).

Unit prices by channel

Yuan per 500 grams — the 斤, the unit the official bulletins print, so nothing has been converted. Fruit and cheese are marked per kilogram instead.

Category	Wholesale	Farm market	Community shop	Chain supermarket	Second city, May 2026
Vegetables	1.55	not published	3.94	4.52	2.57 (20-variety average)
Pork	8.14	14.07	—	15.03	12.33 (all cuts)
Beef	32.29	34.77	—	42.47	33.33
Lamb	27.51	38.09	—	45.88	33.04
Eggs	3.68	4.41	—	4.90	4.67
Fruit	7.07 per kg (national, 6 varieties)	not published	—	10.35 per kg, contributor-reported	—
Cheese, “local”	—	—	—	—	—

The first five columns are one city’s February 2026 bulletin, the only public format I found that prints wholesale, farm-market and supermarket prices side by side (link, 2026-03-17). The last column is another city’s May 2026 monitoring (link, 2026-06-01), city averages that name no channel. Fruit sets the national six-variety wholesale average for 13–19 July 2026 (link, 2026-07-20) against a contributor-reported retail average from Numbeo, updated October 2026, whose cheese item is labelled “local” and may be domestically produced.

Two cells are weaker than they look. The vegetable farm-market figure is a 20-variety average in one city in May, not a February stall price — the February bulletin carries no farm-market column for vegetables. And the second city’s pork average covers every cut it monitors, which pulls it below the mixed-cut price beside it.

Same bulletin, the staples: japonica rice 3.25 at the farm market against 2.93 at the supermarket, plain flour 2.21 against 2.23, blended oil 67.05 against 73.85 a 5-litre bottle, peanut oil 150.33 against 160.26 (link, 2026-03-17).

Three monthly baskets

My baskets, not anyone’s survey: the quantities are an assumption; every unit price behind them is cited above. One person, one month, prices per kilogram.

Item	Quantity	Localised	Mixed	Imported-heavy
Vegetables	15 kg	5.14	9.04	9.04
Pork	3 kg	28.14	30.06	30.06
Beef	1 kg	69.54	84.94	69.54
Eggs	1.5 kg	8.82	9.80	9.80
Fruit	5 kg	10.35	10.35	129 for one 2 kg-plus shipped durian, plus 3 kg at 10.35
Rice	4 kg	6.50	5.86	5.86
Cooking oil	1 L	13.41	14.77	14.77
Cheese, “local”	0.5 kg	—	—	88.54
Packaging, 12 orders	—	—	12.00	12.00
Total		¥335	¥427	¥565

Localised buys vegetables and meat at a farm market, rice at the farm-market price, and nothing for packaging, because it does not order online. Mixed buys vegetables, meat and eggs at chain-supermarket counters, fruit at the contributor-reported average, and pays 1.00 yuan an order on 12 delivery orders a month — the middle of the four reported fees, and my order count, not a measured one. Imported-heavy keeps domestic beef, since I could not verify a 2026 imported price; buys two of its five fruit kilograms as one shipped durian at the price a live-stream shopper pays; and adds half a kilogram of “local” cheese, the nearest public price that might be foreign.

The gap between the first two baskets is 27 percent, mostly vegetables: retail vegetables start at nearly three times their wholesale price, pork at under twice. The fruit row is the weakest number here: I found no channel-differentiated retail fruit series, so two baskets share one proxy.

Time and language, which are also prices

The channel open at 19:00 is the channel that closes at midday.

	Early / wet market	Supermarket	Warehouse club	Delivery
Window	before dawn to midday; permanent markets run all day	long retail hours, all week	store hours; one location, often a long trip	about 30 minutes, to your door
Serving	per counter, per item; you are served	self-service	self-service, one till queue	none
Price posted as	spoken, per 斤	labelled	labelled	labelled
Language needed	speaking; cut and vegetable names are local	none to minimal	minimal to none	none
Payment	QR code; a foreign card works inside Alipay or WeChat Pay	card or QR	membership card, sold on site	app account, Chinese number in practice
The awkward part	the price is written nowhere you can read from a distance	what is left at that hour	the pack size sets your unit price	no item price is in any published series

The 2025 EF English Proficiency Index puts China 86th of 123 countries and regions, score 464 and speaking 448, against a global average of 488 (EF EPI 2025). Shopping is exactly when the speaking sub-score is what you are using.

On payment the limits are documented: a foreign card linked to Alipay or WeChat Pay has a ceiling of 5,000 US dollars per transaction and 50,000 a year (a municipal government service page, published March 2024, updated 2026-07-24). Transactions at or below 200 yuan carry no fee, anything above carries 3 percent — WeChat Pay’s own FAQ, reproduced by a provincial government page (link, 2023-07-22) and restated in a fee-waiver announcement (CNR, 2025-05-26). Neither company’s own fee page would load.

Why these numbers can only be ranges

Region. On collection day 2026-01-08 the ministry’s 500-county monitoring put pork at 26.27 yuan per kilo in South China and 19.38 in the Northeast — 36 percent apart, same day, same dataset (MARA, 2026-01-13). On 2026-07-23 the same series had 24.16 against 18.06, still 34 percent apart (week 4 of July, 2026-07-29). No national average survives that.

Season. The 28-variety wholesale basket averaged 5.77 yuan per kilo in the week of 22–28 December 2025 (Farmers’ Daily via Xinhua, 2026-01-06) and 4.21 in the week of 13–19 July 2026 (MARA week 29, 2026-07-20): winter vegetables 37 percent more than summer ones. Inside that week, cucumber moved 24.5 percent, spinach 11.0, oilseed rape greens 9.5 and lettuce 8.2.

Nothing is posted at the stall. State Administration for Market Regulation Order No. 56, in force since 2022-07-01, requires sellers to label prices accurately, keep the tag with the goods and make the marking conspicuous, while letting city-level regulators exempt specific trades from marking (full text, issued 2022). I have no measurement of wet-market compliance and will not invent one. A national market price for pork exists because the ministry samples 500 county markets, not because the markets publish anything.

Policy moves shelf prices. Imported beef has been under a safeguard measure since 2026-01-01: country quotas, then an extra 55 percent on the applied tariff once a country’s quota is used (MOFCOM Announcement 2025 No. 87, dated 2025-12-31). Australia reached 100 percent of its quota on 2026-06-18 and the extra tariff applied from 00:00 on 2026-06-20 (Xinhua, 2026-06-19). Fruit goes the other way: Thai Monthong durian started at 28 yuan per kilo at a wholesale market in Yunnan, a decline Xinhua attributes to cold-chain rail freight (Xinhua, 2026-05-08, which prices that 28 yuan at 4.09 US dollars — about 14.6 US cents to the yuan).

And prices travel. The 500-county series had pork at 23.00 yuan per kilo on 2026-01-08 (MARA, 2026-01-13) and 20.96 on 2026-07-23 (week 4 of July, 2026-07-29), down 8.9 percent. Wholesale pork went from 17.44 in the week of 22–28 December 2025 (Xinhua, 2026-01-06) to 15.89 in the week of 13–19 July 2026 (MARA week 29, 2026-07-20), also down 8.9 percent. Wholesale eggs in that July week were 42.3 percent higher year on year. Any figure you read for Chinese food prices has a shelf life of about a season.

Where these numbers come from

Primary series wherever one exists, keeping the sources’ own units and dates rather than harmonising them.

Wholesale: the ministry’s daily index bulletin, printing pork, beef, lamb, egg, vegetable and fruit averages as of 14:00 each day from the national wholesale price information system (2026-07-24), plus its weekly reports (week 29).
Farm market: the same ministry’s 500-county weekly series, each report naming its collection day (January 2026).
Retail by channel: city development and reform commission monthly bulletins — February 2026 for the channel columns, a second city’s unlabelled averages (May 2026) for the last one. None of those cities is where I live, and I am not naming the province or city where I buy food.
Cross-checks: the 36-city centre average, pork at 13.19 yuan per 500 grams on 2026-07-08 (China Price Information Network, 2026-07-09); the statistics bureau’s July 2026 CPI note (NBS); the FAO Food Price Index, 136.0 points in September 2026 (FAO, 2026-10-02).
Platform fees: trade-press reports of the platforms’ own app notices (packaging, delivery and pickup).
Crowd-sourced: Numbeo (updated October 2026) and LivingCost, food at 235 US dollars a month for one person (LivingCost, dated 2026-06-21 on the page).

The kilogram conversions, basket totals and percentage gaps are my arithmetic, labelled where they appear.

What I could not check

Warehouse club prices. No public item-price series exists, so that channel is a membership fee and nothing else — reported by news and trade outlets quoting the companies, not by the retailers’ own pages, which would not load.
Delivery item prices and fee notices. No public series: the delivery channel is fees and thresholds taken from trade press quoting app notices, not from a rate card.
Imported beef prices. Removed rather than kept: the only item-level figure I found was a news survey dated June 2024, before the 2026 safeguard.
Wet-market price-tag compliance. The rule requires tags; compliance is what I could not measure.
The card fee and the exchange rate. The 3 percent fee rests on secondary carriers of the companies’ statements, and the yuan rate on one news report’s rounding of a single price.
The vegetable and fruit rows. The vegetable farm-market figure is a 20-variety average whose channel the source never names; the fruit retail figure is a contributor-reported average set against an official wholesale series from another month.
LivingCost’s food figure and the cheese price. One aggregated number with no visible method, and a crowd-sourced item labelled “local cheese” that may mean domestically produced.
Early markets as a monitored category. No series separates a pre-dawn market from the permanent one; that channel is the wet-market price with a different closing time.
Anything about my own city. Deliberately absent.

Two urbanisation rates for one country

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ask what share of China is urban and two official sources answer differently. The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) puts the end of 2025 at 67.89 per cent (2025 statistical communiqué, 2026-02-28). The World Bank’s World Development Indicators put the same year at 66.34 per cent (WDI, indicator SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS, retrieved 2026-10-09, series last updated 2026-10-08).

That is not rounding. The gap is about 20.6 million people: 953.80 million urban residents counted by NBS, against 933.17 million in the World Bank series (WDI, SP.URB.TOTL, retrieved 2026-10-09). The denominators differ too — 1,404.89 million year-end residents (NBS, 2026-02-28) against 1,406.59 million, and the World Bank’s population series is a midyear estimate rather than a year-end count (WDI, SP.POP.TOTL metadata, retrieved 2026-10-09). This post is about what each figure counts, a year-by-year table, and then the part I cared about: what a single county in northern China can and cannot show with the same statistics.

What each publisher is counting

NBS counts resident population on urban territory. The indicator is 常住人口城镇化率: the resident population of an area’s urban territory as a share of that area’s total resident population (NBS statistics explainer, page updated 2025-02-28). Two definitions sit underneath it.

Where urban begins. The 城镇/乡村 line follows the rule the State Council approved as 国函[2008]60号, which makes the residents’ or villagers’ committee the unit of classification and actual construction the test (rule text, approved 2008-07-12, in force 2008-08-01). Urban territory is 城区 plus 镇区: 城区 is the area connected to a district or city government seat, 镇区 the area connected to a county government seat or another town seat. A village whose houses merge into a town’s built-up area is urban by that test, without anyone moving.
Who is resident. A person counts as resident after living in the same township or subdistrict for six months or more (7th census bulletin no. 3, 2021-05-11), hukou or no hukou.

In census years the rate is computed from the census. In other years NBS splits the annual change into expansion of urban territory, natural growth inside urban areas, and rural-to-urban migration (explainer above). The first of those three has nothing to do with people moving.

The World Bank publishes the United Nations’ number, not China’s. The WDI series is sourced to the UN Population Division’s World Urbanization Prospects and carries the note that the data “are collected and smoothed by United Nations Population Division”, with source organisation “World Urbanization Prospects, United Nations (UN) … National definitions” (indicator metadata, retrieved 2026-10-09). It is a modelled series built on national definitions, not the Chinese administrative count.

Two sentences from that programme are worth keeping. Definitions “vary from country to country and may not be consistent, even between different data sources within a given country” (WUP 2025 Methodology Report, December 2025). And when the UN applied its harmonised Degree of Urbanization grid to the same planet, 58 per cent of the world was urban in 2025 by aggregated national definitions against 81 per cent living in cities and towns by the grid method (WUP 2025 key messages, November 2025). “Urban” is not one measurement anywhere, including here.

Seven years, a source on every row

Rates in per cent; urban population in millions. The gap is NBS minus World Bank. World Bank values from WDI SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS, retrieved 2026-10-09.

Year	NBS rate	NBS urban population	World Bank rate	Gap (pp)	Sources and dates
2019	60.60	848.43	62.71	−2.11	NBS communiqué, 2020-02-28; WDI
2020	63.89	901.99	63.52	+0.37	7th census bulletin no. 7, 2021-05-11; WDI
2021	64.72	914.25	64.72	0.00	NBS communiqué, 2022-02-28; WDI
2022	65.22	920.71	65.22	0.00	NBS communiqué, 2023-02-28; WDI
2023	66.16	932.67	65.53	+0.63	NBS communiqué, 2024-02-29; WDI
2024	67.00	943.50	65.89	+1.11	NBS communiqué, 2025-02-28; WDI
2025	67.89	953.80	66.34	+1.55	NBS communiqué, 2026-02-28; WDI

The 2020 row comes from the census bulletin, which is where the census-year figure is published.

Three things the table does not say by itself.

Part of the NBS series has been rewritten. Footnote 21 of the 2021 communiqué records that the year-end urbanisation rates for 2017 to 2019 were revised after the census (NBS, 2022-02-28). The 2019 row above is the figure as published at the time. The revised values live in the statistical yearbook, and the tables I could reach there are published as images, so I could not read them.

There is a second Chinese rate, and it moves differently. NBS also publishes 户籍人口城镇化率, the urban share by household registration. The 2019 communiqué put it at 44.38 per cent against 60.60 per cent for residence, and credits the figure to the Ministry of Public Security (NBS, 2020-02-28); the 2020 census published 45.4 per cent against 63.89 (bulletin no. 7, 2021-05-11); at the end of 2023 the ministry put it at 48.3 per cent (Ministry of Public Security briefing, reported by Xinhua, 2024-05-27). I found no official figure for 2024 or 2025. The two rates sat 16.2 points apart in 2019, 18.5 in 2020 and 17.9 in 2023 (my subtraction, from the figures linked above), which is the phenomenon NBS describes in its explainer: people move to towns faster than hukou moves.

A related series steps, and the step is method. 人户分离人口, people whose residence and hukou sit in different townships, was 280 million in the 2019 communiqué (NBS, 2020-02-28) and 504 million in the 2021 one (NBS, 2022-02-28). The 2020 census counted 492.76 million, of whom 375.82 million were classified as 流动人口 (bulletin no. 7, 2021-05-11). A jump from 280 million to 504 million between two annual publications, 80 per cent in two years (my arithmetic from the two linked bulletins), is a change of counting basis. The item is not annual either: I searched the 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 communiqués and the term appears in none of them.

The county I have data for

For the rest of this post I use a rural county in northern China. It is one county-level unit among the more than 2,000 the county yearbook covers, and I am not printing its name or its figures.

I started from impressions that anyone who visits such a place would form. Then I went looking for the columns.

What the statistics can answer:

Has the resident population fallen? Computable, but only across censuses. County totals for 2010 and 2020 are published, and the 2020 county volume, 中国人口普查分县资料—2020 (510 yuan, published 2022-07), adds population structure and household living conditions (NBS book page).
Hukou population, output, public finance, school enrolment. Published by county in 中国县域统计年鉴 (县市卷), covering more than 2,000 county-level units (NBS book page, 2019-07-08), at a lag of a year or two. The publisher’s page describes the volume in general terms, so the column names I use come from third-party extracts rather than the book itself.
Was the county’s urban area redefined? NBS maintains the statistical division codes and urban/rural classification codes every year and publishes them (NBS reply, 2023-11-13), so a change in urban territory is visible even when the population is not.

What the statistics cannot answer:

How many homes stand empty. I could not find a housing-vacancy series published by any statistical system. The number in circulation is a survey estimate: an urban housing vacancy rate of 21.4 per cent in 2017, about 65 million dwellings (China Household Finance Survey, 2017 urban housing vacancy report, 2018-12-21). That is a national sample, not a county count.
Who left, and where they went. No annual county-level migration series exists in the sources I searched. The census gives one snapshot per decade, and the hukou-versus-residence difference at county level mixes departures with arrivals.
Unemployment. The annual communiqué carries one national rate, 5.2 per cent on average in 2025 (NBS, 2026-02-28). It is not broken down to province, let alone county.
House prices. The monthly index quoted in the communiqué covers 70 large and medium-sized cities (NBS, 2026-02-28). A county is not in it.

So the three claims that come up most often divide cleanly. “Nobody lives in the new blocks by the county town” has no indicator behind it anywhere. “All the young people have gone” has no indicator either, only a decennial census snapshot and a hukou-versus-residence difference. “The county’s economy is shrinking” is checkable in the yearbook, at a two-year lag. Only one of the three can be checked, and it is not the one people say first.

Why one county is not China

The county is in the tables above because its row exists in each of them. I did not pick it for being typical, and it is not.

It is one county among more than 2,000 county-level units in the yearbook’s coverage.
The national rate is a weighted average in which large cities and their suburbs dominate, so a shrinking agricultural county and the country can move in opposite directions, both reported with equal confidence.
A county’s own urbanisation rate depends on where its 镇区 boundaries sit, which depends on the annual updating of classification codes. Two neighbouring counties with similar human geography can print different rates.

How to run the same check on a county you know:

Find its resident population in the 2010 and 2020 census county tables. That gives one real change over a long interval, with no annual noise.
Read its row in 中国县域统计年鉴 (县市卷) and note which columns exist. Hukou population and school enrolment are there in third-party extracts; housing stock and unemployment are not.
Check the county’s urban/rural classification codes for the two years you are comparing. If the urban territory grew, part of any rate change is reclassification.
Write the claim you want to make, then find the column that would settle it. If the column does not exist, you are not making a statistical claim, whatever it feels like.
For housing, expect nothing. The nearest official material is unsold floor space held by developers: 766.32 million square metres of newly built commodity housing at the end of 2025, of which 402.36 million was residential (NBS, 2026-02-28). That is developer inventory, not homes without occupants, and it is national.

What I could not check

The revised NBS rates for 2017–2019. The revision is documented in a footnote; the revised annual values are in yearbook tables published as images on the NBS site, which I could not read.
Which WUP vintage produced the World Bank’s values for 2023–2025. The indicator metadata names the programme and “national definitions” but not the revision year.
Whether the World Bank’s China value equals the WUP 2025 published figure under national definitions. The UN Data Portal lists an indicator, “Percentage of population by national urban definition”, but its data endpoint returned 401 without an API key (retrieved 2026-10-09), and the download centre’s national-definitions table sits behind a client-side tab whose files I could not address directly.
An official vacancy rate at any level. My finding is negative: I could not find one. That is a search result, not a sourced fact.
Vacancy figures from CHFS rounds after 2017. Later rounds ran — the 2025 round covered 23,277 households, mainly across 243 district- and county-level units (survey description, retrieved 2026-10-09) — and I found no published vacancy update.
The exact column list of 中国县域统计年鉴. The publisher’s page describes the volume in general terms; the column names I used come from third-party extracts, not from the book itself.
Whether this county publishes its own annual statistical communiqué with a resident-population figure. Some counties do; I did not verify this one.
Any 户籍人口城镇化率 figure after 2023, and how many provinces publish annual county-level resident population. I did not survey provincial yearbooks.

What a China factory quote actually contains

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I buy small runs of custom parts from factories in China. At that size there is no portal. The quote arrives as a PDF: a summary row on top, a pile of line items underneath. Buyers read the summary row. The lines are where the money is, and most of them sit on a rate card that somebody else already publishes.

The fields on the page

A quote is a filled-in version of the buyer’s enquiry sheet. The closest thing to a canonical copy I have found is a mould enquiry form (模具询价单) in a course reader hosted by a Chinese university’s IT centre (course reader PDF, no publication date, fetched 9 Oct 2026). It asks for part name, cavity count, part drawing number, quotation version and quotation deadline, resin and shrinkage, and then a yes/no block covering ejection type, runner and gate type, hot runner, slides, cooling, core and cavity steel, finish, and vent depth. The version number is the point: two quotes are comparable only if both share it.

Field	Why it gets skipped	Range, with source	What I ask for
Sample fee	one number quoted; freight often excluded	courier only, China→US zone 6: CNY 446/0.5 kg document, CNY 505/0.5 kg non-document, CNY 1,959/5 kg non-document (DHL Express Service & Rate Guide 2026: China, 2026 edition, fetched 9 Oct 2026)	whether it covers freight and clearance; whose courier account
Tooling / mould fee	never itemised	total only; no public per-item card (see below)	its own invoice line, never in the unit price
MOQ	one number quoted; two exist	private-mould injection parts run to MOQ ≥1,000 pieces while common-mould work takes 50 (1688 Wiki, undated, fetched 9 Oct 2026)	manufacturing MOQ and packaging MOQ as separate numbers
Payment terms	the split hides where risk sits	30% deposit, 70% before shipment: industry-common figure, unverified	the instrument (T/T or L/C); who pays intermediary deductions
Bank and FX charges	never on the factory’s paper	0.1% of amount, min USD 50, max USD 300, plus USD 30 cable; correspondent charges “according to actual amount deducted”; inward payment max USD 50 (Credit Agricole CIB China standard tariff, effective 10 April 2026)	OUR / BEN / SHA stated in the contract
Quote validity	reads as a formality	USD/CNY central parity 7.0187 on 7 Jan 2026 → 6.7330 on 9 Oct 2026, a 4.07% renminbi appreciation (PBOC announcement, 7 Jan 2026; 9 Oct 2026)	a named fixing date, not a day count
Inspection / QC	filed under “buyer’s account”	0.7% of declared value, min CNY 5,000, or CNY 2,500 per man-day (CCIC provincial company fee notice, 11 April 2024)	the man-day rate and man-day count
Packaging and marks	looks like logistics; priced as material and freight	non-conveyable CNY 155, oversize CNY 155, non-stackable pallet CNY 2,340 (DHL guide 2026: China, same edition)	carton spec, stack height and pallet footprint before tooling

The tooling line is one number with a known shape

Mould makers do not itemise a mould. “Mould: USD X.” The structure of X is documented: a paper in Die & Mould Industry (《模具工业》, 2005, No. 2, article 1001-2168(2005)02-0054-04) describes a mould centre’s own quotation system and gives the trade’s model — materials (mould base, plates, slides, hardware) + machining (design, CNC milling, wire cutting, EDM, machining, fitting, heat treatment, surface treatment, trial moulding) + overhead (the paper’s worked example: 10% of the first two) + profit (paper text, course reader copy of the 2005 journal article, fetched 9 Oct 2026). The sentence that matters: part of the profit sits in a profit line and part is hidden inside the material and machining detail lines. “Show me the breakdown” is not a request for transparency; it is an opening bid.

Tooling sub-item	Costed as (same paper)	Public per-item rate?
Mould base	catalogue size series; custom bases quoted after a stock and machining assessment	sizes public, prices not (LKM standard mould bases, side-gate system, undated, fetched 9 Oct 2026: 150 × 150 mm to 1000 × 1300 mm, twelve model variants)
Cavity / core steel	L × W × H × density × unit-weight cost	no
CNC milling	hours × average hourly rate	no
Wire-cut EDM	length of cut	no
Sinker EDM	hours × average hourly rate (listed as a trade, like the rest)	no
Surface treatment / finish	its own trade in the same list	no
T1 trial shot	its own trade line (试模, trial moulding)	no

The tooling line is quotable only as a total; read a five-line breakdown as an aid to judgement, not as cost data.

Sample fee

The sample itself is labour plus a little resin; moving it is what costs. DHL’s 2026 China guide puts the United States in zone 6 for export, and its rates “exclude customs duties, taxes, clearance-related charges, VAT and all surcharges” (DHL 2026: China, rate tables and surcharge pages, fetched 9 Oct 2026). The surcharges then arrive from the same document: fuel, a percentage of transport and applicable services reset from a U.S. Gulf Coast kerosene-type jet-fuel index; remote-area delivery at CNY 4/kg, minimum CNY 200; shipment insurance at CNY 100 or 1% of stated value; address correction at CNY 87. On a T1 sample the freight is routinely the largest item, and if it ships collect it never reaches the factory’s paper at all.

MOQ is two numbers wearing one label

Manufacturing MOQ (mould, machine setup, resin minimum purchase) and packaging MOQ (plates or die-cut tooling for carton and label) diverge, and usually only one is quoted. 1688’s own wiki puts private-mould injection parts at MOQ ≥1,000, common-mould or standard-structure goods at 50, and attribute-level customisation at 50–200 (1688 Wiki, undated, fetched 9 Oct 2026); a second page from the same source says deep customisation on structure, material or size “usually jumps to 50–500 pieces”, and that suppliers who list “property customisation” options often set a separate MOQ per option — 100 pieces for a packaging change, 300 for a size change (1688 Wiki, undated, fetched 9 Oct 2026). Ask for both MOQs separately, and ask which option you are actually selecting.

Payment terms

The 30%/70% split is repeated everywhere and traced to nothing: industry-common figure, unverified. What is documented is the machinery around it — ICC’s UCP 600 for documentary credits (ICC, UCP 600 text), and Incoterms 2020 for where cost and risk transfer (ICC, Incoterms 2020).

Bank and FX charges

Worked example on a USD 20,000 balance: 0.1% is USD 20, so the USD 50 floor applies, plus USD 30 cable — USD 80 before any intermediary. The line that matters is the bank’s own note that correspondent charges are deducted “according to actual amount” (Credit Agricole CIB China standard tariff, effective 10 April 2026). If the factory’s receivable lands short, that is the mechanism, and it is in the bank’s document, not the factory’s. Put OUR / BEN / SHA in the contract.

Quote validity is a currency position

Date	USD/CNY central parity	Source
2026-01-07	7.0187	PBOC
2026-01-30	6.9678	PBOC
2026-10-08	6.7367	PBOC
2026-10-09	6.7330	PBOC

The PBOC authorises CFETS to publish that fixing each business day. Four percent over nine months, between the first and last rows. If the quote is in USD and the factory converts to CNY to pay wages, that 4% is the factory’s problem and returns as an email about “recent exchange rate movements”. If the quote is in CNY and you pay in USD, it is yours. Name the fixing in the contract, not a day count.

Quote validity is also a steel position

Baosteel reprices monthly. Its 10 July 2026 notice raised August prices by RMB 50 per tonne across hot-rolled, heavy plate, pickled, cold-rolled, hot-dip galvanised, colour-coated and silicon steel (notice text via Shanghai Metals Market, 10 July 2026). Its 10 September 2026 notice raised October prices by RMB 200 per tonne on hot-rolled, pickled and cold-rolled, RMB 200 on galvanised and colour-coated, and RMB 100 on heavy plate (notice text via Mysteel, 10 September 2026). Two months apart, and the second quarterly step was four times the first.

Non-ferrous inputs move daily. The 8 October 2026 schedule from China Nonferrous Metals News (中国有色网, published by 中国有色金属报社; the table is the Changjiang spot quote republished from 长江有色金属网, 13% tax included) lists A00 aluminium ingot at ¥23,760/tonne, 1# copper at ¥112,700/tonne, ADC12 die-casting alloy at ¥24,300/tonne and ZAMAK-3 zinc alloy at ¥27,050/tonne (China Nonferrous Metals News, 8 October 2026). A 90-day validity is three mill repricings and some sixty non-ferrous fixings.

Inspection and QC

CCIC’s provincial company files a public fee notice (11 April 2024): inspection and appraisal at 0.7% of declared value, minimum CNY 5,000, or CNY 2,500 per man-day; container tallying at CNY 750 small and CNY 875 large; Africa-bound pre-shipment inspection at CNY 800 valuation per order plus CNY 500 loading supervision per container (CCIC fee notice, 11 April 2024). TÜV Rheinland’s Greater China ISO 9001 price page gives a formula, not a number — (total man-days × man-day rate + certificate fee) × VAT + travel, VAT at 6% (TÜV Rheinland, Greater China, undated, fetched 9 Oct 2026). Pin down the rate and the count. For an out-of-market comparison, SGS publishes ₹15,000 per man-day for its NPOP scheme in India (SGS India tariff in APEDA format, 27 August 2025) — same industry, not a China rate.

Packaging and marks

Packing gets priced twice. DHL bills a piece as non-conveyable (CNY 155 international) if it weighs 25–70 kg, is not fully enclosed, or is packaged in metal, wood, leather, hard or soft plastic, or expanded polystyrene foam rather than corrugated cardboard. Oversize (CNY 155) is a longest side over 100 cm or a second-longest side over 80 cm. A non-stackable pallet is CNY 2,340, and does not apply to pallets below 25 kg (DHL 2026: China, surcharge definitions). The packing spec is a price line decided in the same meeting as the unit price. Shipping marks — what goes on the carton, and whether they match the packing list — have no primary rule I could find; they are agreed per order, so agree them in writing.

How these numbers were collected

Fetched in one sitting on 9 October 2026: operator rate cards (DHL Express China 2026, Credit Agricole CIB China effective 10 April 2026, TÜV Rheinland Greater China, CCIC’s provincial fee notice, SGS India); state-published rates (PBOC currency fixings, China Nonferrous Metals News spot schedule); one mill’s sales-price notices (Baosteel, as reprinted by SMM and Mysteel); a mould-base maker’s public catalogue sizes (LKM); platform documentation (1688 Wiki); and two teaching documents on mould quotes. Where a figure rests on a marketplace or editorial page rather than a rate card, the sentence says so, and undated pages carry their fetch date instead.

What I could not check

Per-item tooling prices. CNC hours, wire-cut length, EDM, surface treatment and T1 come from shop-internal hour rates. No published card found; I will not copy sourcing blogs that show none.
The 30%/70% split. Untraceable to a primary publisher. Industry-common, unverified.
“In the thousands” as a headline MOQ quote. The phrasing circulates, but I could only verify the platform’s own numbers — ≥1,000 for private moulds, 50 for common moulds. Neither 1688 Wiki page I used carries a publication date.
Packaging and carton MOQ norms. No primary publisher; the only figures are platform editorial pages, and the tiered-price examples on them are illustrative, not data.
Commercial China inspection rates from SGS, Bureau Veritas and Intertek. None publish a per-man-day card for consumer-goods work, and the CCIC figure is one provincial notice, so I cannot claim it is nationally uniform.
Whether Baosteel’s adjustment reaches any specific part. Flat steel, not ingot — the cadence, not a part price.
Mould steel spot prices. No mill or index card I would cite. The tooling cost model paper is from 2005: method, not 2026 prices.
My own quotes. Not published, and none appear above.

Why Chinese people drink hot water, per the record

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ask why people in China drink hot water and you get two answers, both delivered with confidence. One is traditional: hot water is a Chinese thing, thousands of years old, rooted in the medical vocabulary of cold and hot. The other is modern: public health campaigns taught a poor country to boil its water, and the habit stuck.

This piece is about the history behind those answers. It is not about whether hot water is good for you. That is a medical question, I cannot answer it, and nothing below is advice.

The classical record has both temperatures in it

The vocabulary is real. In the Mengzi (attributed to Mencius, text usually dated to the late 4th century BC — Wikipedia, accessed 9 Oct 2026), a disciple asks whether eating and drinking are internal or external to a person, and uses temperature as his example: “In winter one drinks tang, in summer one drinks shui” (Mengzi, Gaozi I, undated digital edition). Tang is hot liquid, usually broth; shui is plain water. The sentence treats cold water in summer as ordinary.

The cold-injury idea is also old. The Huangdi Neijing corpus, compiled somewhere between the Warring States and the Han (Wikipedia, accessed 9 Oct 2026), contains the line “cold in the body and a cold drink injure the lung” (Lingshu, Xieqi Zangfu Bingxing, undated digital edition). The hot/cold categories long predate the twentieth century. What I could not find in the classical corpus is the thing people actually claim it says: that plain hot water is the correct daily drink.

For most of the record the binding constraint was fuel. Ennin, a Japanese monk who travelled through China between 838 and 847 (Wikipedia, accessed 9 Oct 2026), wrote that ordinary people in what is now Shandong “never cooked soup, and ate cold food all year” (Wenzhai Bao, 3 Feb 2018; it reprints an Elderly Daily essay). In the Song and Yuan, teahouses spread and tea reached ordinary people, but boiling water cost more fuel than cooking did. Households that could not afford a fire bought tea door to door from hawkers carrying kettles; the trade was called ti cha ping, “carrying the tea flask.” Boiled water for the poor was a service you bought (Wenzhai Bao, 3 Feb 2018).

Shops that sold boiled water

By the 1830s, cities around the Yangtze delta had hot-water shops, called laohuzao or “tiger stoves,” selling water for drinking and washing (Sixth Tone, 28 Sep 2017). In the Republican period the same trade appears as shushui dian, “cooked-water shops,” in cities in the southeast such as Shanghai and Wuhu. A 1930s Shanghai municipal survey of workers’ living conditions found the water cheap enough that workers bought it for cooking as well as drinking, to save on their own fuel bills (Wenzhai Bao, 3 Feb 2018).

Outside the cities the picture inverts. A 1930s survey of eleven villages in Qingyuan county, Hebei, led by Chen Hansheng and the Beiping Institute of Social Research, found households burning roots, wheat straw and dry grass, cooking briefly when they cooked at all, and unable to afford boiled water: people drank raw water from wells and rivers, including in the coldest part of winter (Wenzhai Bao, 3 Feb 2018).

Bacteriology gives boiling a new argument

The Republican-era shift was that boiling stopped being folk habit and became a scientific proposition: germ theory arrived from the West, intellectuals started urging the public to drink hot water, and governments promoted it intermittently, subject to whether the money existed (Wenzhai Bao, 3 Feb 2018).

In 1934 the Nationalist government launched the New Life Movement, whose “Essentials” guidelines on food instructed the public to drink boiled water, on the grounds that it would limit bacteria and diseases such as dysentery (Sixth Tone, 28 Sep 2017). The same account says war and weak administration limited its reach.

After 1949 the promotion became systematic. The Patriotic Health Campaign committee instructed cadres to “repeatedly educate the masses to drink boiled and disinfected water, and not to drink raw water,” and rural health textbooks told health workers to promote boiled water (Wenzhai Bao, 3 Feb 2018).

The campaign’s own dates are documented, though they are about germ warfare rather than about water.

Date	Documented event	Source
1952-03-14	The Government Administration Council’s 128th meeting creates the Central Epidemic Prevention Committee, chaired by Zhou Enlai, to lead counter-germ-warfare work	People’s Daily party-history site, 3 Mar 2020 — a party-media account citing the 1993 Chronicle of Health Work in Contemporary China
1952-03-19	Zhou Enlai, as committee chairman, issues the “Instruction on Countering Germ Warfare”	same
1952-07	People’s Daily runs the editorial “Further Carry Out the Patriotic Health Campaign”: 5 July in the academic account, 10 July on the wiki page	Zhang Liang & Ma Xiaoyan, Historical Research in Anhui, 2021; Wikipedia (secondary)
1952-12	Mao Zedong’s inscription to the second National Health Conference: “arise, pay attention to hygiene, reduce disease, raise health levels, smash the enemy’s germ warfare”	People’s Daily party-history channel reprinting Study Times, 12 Jun 2020
1952–1954	“Patriotic health campaign” becomes the fixed term, in the germ-warfare context	Zhang Liang & Ma Xiaoyan, Historical Research in Anhui 2021, no. 5, pp. 160–168
1956–1959	The campaign’s content is “eliminate the four pests, stress hygiene”	same

Boiling water was the household-level tool because the utility-level one was missing. In cities, factories and government offices ran water-boiling rooms and gave water out on tickets, a system that persisted into the 1980s and 1990s. One documented example is a cigarette factory in Jinan: boiling rooms set up in the 1950s, water tickets at one fen for two bottles in 1982, closed in the early 1990s for environmental reasons. In the countryside, comparable communal supply existed briefly during the public-canteen period of 1958 to 1960 (Wenzhai Bao, 3 Feb 2018).

The same essay gives a rough proxy for how the practice spread, in thermos output (Wenzhai Bao, 3 Feb 2018): 0.3bn units in 1957, 1.38bn in 1983, 2.66bn in 1997. The essay concludes that most people could drink hot water when they wanted by the mid-1990s. Those three figures are single-sourced and I could not trace them further.

The pipes arrived late, and unevenly

Year	Fact	Source
1908-03	The agriculture and commerce ministry petitions to build the capital’s water company, partly for fire-fighting; approved	People’s Daily Overseas Edition, 4 Feb 2020
1910-02	The Dongzhimen plant is completed; supply to the city begins that March; the plant initially serves a little over 3,000 people, and residents distrust the bubbles in the water	same
1949	One water plant, 29 wells, 50,000 m³/day capacity and 364 km of pipe in the capital; piped coverage in the urban area is 30.41%	China Urban Water Association, 8 Sep 2023; People’s Daily Overseas Edition, 4 Feb 2020
1967	Urban piped coverage reaches 99.86%	People’s Daily Overseas Edition, 4 Feb 2020
2006–07	A national survey finds 317m rural residents without microbiologically safe water, and about 607m (85% of the rural population) boiling their drinking water	Cohen et al., PLOS ONE, 30 Sep 2015
2021	National urban water-supply penetration rate: 99.38%	MOHURD 2021 urban construction bulletin, released 30 Sep 2022, reposted by the Wuhan Water Authority
end 2024	Rural tap-water penetration rate: 94%	Ministry of Water Resources, Aug 2025
end 2025	Rural tap-water penetration rate: 96%	Ministry of Water Resources via gov.cn, 12 May 2026

Those numbers measure whether a household is on a pipe, not whether the water is safe. The 2006–07 survey is the one figure here that measures safety, and it is two decades old.

The other side of the glass

The Western habit of iced water has a start date that is easier to pin down than China’s. In 1806 Frederic Tudor loaded 130 tons of Massachusetts ice onto a ship and sent it to Martinique (National Geographic, 19 Jul 2014; Wikipedia, Frederic Tudor, accessed 9 Oct 2026). The first cargo lost money. Tudor then gave ice away to American taverns, the taverns put it in drinks, and customers came back to buy it — that, at least, is how the historian Jonathan Rees describes the market being created (CNN, 25 Jul 2025).

Rees’s book on the subject is Refrigeration Nation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), and his argument is that the American fondness for ice is a specific national trait that Europeans never adopted. The same CNN piece quotes the ice historian Amy Brady on Charles Dickens, who was, in her words, “shocked and frankly disgusted” by the “mounds of ice overflowing from American drinks.” Mechanical refrigeration follows: John Gorrie’s US patent 8,080, for a machine to make ice, is granted on 1851-05-06 (US Patent 8,080; the patent model is held by the Smithsonian Institution per Wikipedia, John Gorrie, accessed 9 Oct 2026).

So the two countries solved the same problem — bad water — at different points in the supply chain. In the United States the fix moved to the utility: Jersey City began routine disinfection in 1908, the first American city to do so, and typhoid fell from about 100 cases per 100,000 people in 1900 to 33.8 in 1920 and 0.1 in 2006 (CDC, reviewed 26 Nov 2012). In China, treated supply reached only part of the population for most of the century, and boiling stayed at the household level.

Cold was never absent from China either. The imperial palaces kept ice houses from at least the Zhou; Qing emperors issued ice tickets to officials; street vendors in Beijing sold iced sour-plum drinks to ordinary customers; the country’s first electric refrigerator dates to 1958 (Palace Museum, undated). The Chinese cold tradition was seasonal and aimed at cooling; the American one at drinking water.

What is documented, and what is circulating

Documented, with a source I could reach:

The tang / shui distinction, and cold water in summer as normal, in the Mengzi; cold food and drink as injurious in the Huangdi Neijing corpus (Mengzi, Lingshu).
Song and Yuan teahouses and door-to-door boiled-water tea sales; Ennin’s 9th-century observation that Shandong commoners ate cold food (Wenzhai Bao).
Hot-water shops in delta cities, and the 1930s surveys of Shanghai workers and Hebei villages (Wenzhai Bao, Sixth Tone).
The 1934 New Life Movement boiled-water guideline (one source only) and its limited reach (Sixth Tone, 28 Sep 2017).
The 1952 campaign’s dates and germ-warfare origin; workplace boiling rooms running into the 1980s and 1990s (People’s Daily, Zhang & Ma 2021).
Piped-water coverage figures from 1908 to 2025, as tabulated above.

Circulating, and thinner than it looks:

That Chinese medicine has always prescribed plain hot water. The hot/cold categories are ancient; the daily-drink prescription is not something I found in a classical text.
That China “has always” drunk hot water. The record shows the opposite for anyone who could not afford fuel (Wenzhai Bao).
The 1862 Shanghai cholera outbreak as the moment southerners concluded that hot water had saved them. The numbers attached to it (1.5 million refugees, 3,000 deaths a day) come from one magazine feature (Sixth Tone), and the account is second-hand.
That the New Life Movement universalised boiling. The source I read says it did not.

Method

I worked from documents outward: official bulletins, classical texts, papers and museum material first; magazine features only when they name the document they draw on, and flagged as a single source when they do not. Every number above carries a link and a date on the same line. Where a figure existed in one place only, the line says so. Quotations in Chinese are from the cited pages; translations are mine. I checked each classical quotation against a second text host. I did not look for health outcomes; that is outside this piece.

What I could not check

The original 1883 text by Yuan Zuzhi contrasting Chinese hot-water and Western cold-water habits. I only ever saw the quotation reproduced in a 2018 newspaper reprint.
The thermos production figures (1957, 1983, 1997). They appear in that same reprint and I could not trace them to a statistical yearbook.
The exact date of the 1952 People’s Daily editorial “Further Carry Out the Patriotic Health Campaign” — 5 July in the academic account, 10 July on the wiki page. I did not read the paper’s own archive.
The claim that hot-water shops existed around the Yangtze delta by the 1830s. One magazine feature, no underlying document.
The exact wording of the New Life Movement’s food guideline on boiled water. One magazine feature.
The 1862 Shanghai cholera figures, and the argument that southern China was spared.
The two 1930s surveys — the Shanghai municipal workers’ report and the Qingyuan county village study — which I saw only as quotations.
The MOHURD 2021 bulletin at first hand: I read a government repost of it, not the original PDF.
Whether any national-level document ever set a numerical target for household boiling, as opposed to general exhortation.

Why fast is the default in China

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two things visitors notice here within a day. Trains leave every few minutes and go where the city is. Food ordered at 11:50 arrives before 12:25, close to the 34-minute average Meituan reported for its delivery orders in 2025 (Meituan, July 2025). Neither is treated as a feat. Both are defaults, so a delay reads as a malfunction rather than as weather.

This post is about the machinery behind that: the same four inputs — density, labour, addresses and capital — show up on both sides.

The two systems, year-end 2025

	High-speed rail	Express delivery
Scale of the network	50,000 km of HSR; 165,000 km of railway	515,000 outlets; 430,000 village pickup stations
Annual volume	4.60 bn passenger trips	198.95 bn parcels
Money	¥901.5 bn fixed-asset investment in 2025	¥1.5 tn in express revenue
Time claim	train stops as short as under 2 minutes	51.22 h average door to door
Quality figure	over 98% departure punctuality (2019 assessment)	87.04% delivered within 72 h

Sources: National Railway Administration, 2025 railway statistical bulletin, May 2026; State Post Bureau, 2025 postal industry statistical bulletin, May 2026; World Bank, China’s High-Speed Rail Development, 2019.

Rail: the schedule is the product

The 2025 bulletin puts the railway at 165,000 km, of which 50,000 km is high-speed, with 4.60 bn passenger trips and 1.64 tn passenger-kilometres. In one year the sector spent ¥901.5 bn on fixed assets and put 2,862 km of new high-speed line into service.

The demand side is geography. The World Bank found Chinese high-speed rail competitive against other modes between 150 km and 800 km, and the 350 km/h service competitive up to 1,200 km. Its threshold calculation is blunt: an hourly service between 07:00 and midnight needs about 4 million passengers a year to be worth running, and roughly 40 million to be financially viable at Chinese costs and fares (World Bank, 2019). Few countries have many city pairs that clear 40 million. China’s seventh census counted 21 cities with more than 5 million residents in their urban districts — 7 above 10 million (National Bureau of Statistics chart in Qiushi, 2021) — and 67.89% of the population now lives in cities (NBS 2025 statistical communiqué, February 2026).

China Railway runs close to 10,000 high-speed trains a day nationally (Xinhua, June 2026). The Beijing–Shanghai line alone has run more than 2.22 million trains and carried over 2.3 bn passengers in fifteen years (Xinhua, June 2026); since the first-quarter 2026 timetable the shortest peak departure interval at Beijing South is 3 minutes (Xinhua, February 2026). For scale, the Tokaido Shinkansen runs 383 trains and carries 460,000 passengers a day (FY2024) (JR Central fact sheet, February 2025).

A missed departure usually costs twenty minutes on the Tokaido or Beijing–Shanghai.

The boarding tax, and where the advantage really comes from

The rail advantage people attribute to station location is mostly a boarding advantage. Chinese rail closes the gate 2, 3, 5 or 7 minutes before departure depending on the station, as the railway’s own explainer states (China Railway via CNR, April 2023), and there is no check-in counter and no bag drop. You carry your own luggage — 20 kg free for an ordinary adult, with a 130 cm size limit on high-speed trains (China Railway 12306, carry-on rules).

Air is a different process. Shanghai Hongqiao’s own improvement, announced in June 2026, shortened the cut-off for accepting check-in and bags on all domestic flights to within 30 minutes of departure (CAAC News, June 2026). Thirty minutes of process before the airport’s own security queue, against seven at the station gate.

One correction to the usual story. The World Bank found that Chinese high-speed stations are often built outside the downtown area for cost and urban development reasons, which raises door-to-door time and money (World Bank, 2019). The speed comes from the process and the frequency, not from a platform next to your office.

Punctuality, honestly compared

System	Figure	Year	What is measured
China HSR	over 98% departures, over 95% arrivals; 99%/98% for Fuxing	2019	departure and arrival punctuality
JR Central, Tokaido Shinkansen	1.4 min average delay per train	FY2024	delay per operated train, disasters included
SNCF, TGV	84.99% (Sep 2026); 86.18% (Apr 2026)	2026	composite regularity, trains on time at terminus

Sources: World Bank, 2019; JR Central fact sheet (FY2024); SNCF Voyageurs open data.

The three are not the same measurement: Japan reports seconds of delay, China’s figure is a share of departures on time, France’s counts trains reaching their terminus on time, with a tolerance that widens with journey length. I could not find a current official Chinese punctuality figure; the 98% is the World Bank’s 2019 assessment.

Engineering matters too. A train at 350 km/h needs close to 20 km of reserved braking distance, and the signalling system reads about 32 km ahead. Stops of under two minutes are held by running the train against its safe speed ceiling, which automatic train operation now does instead of a driver (Xinhua, June 2026).

What a ticket costs

The World Bank’s 2011–16 table puts second class on 300–350 km/h services at ¥0.46 per passenger-km, and 200–250 km/h services at ¥0.29 — about one-quarter of the base fares applied in most other high-speed countries (World Bank, 2019). In June 2024 the pricing rule changed on four sections: the published fare rose 19% on the Wuhan–Guangzhou South section and 20% on Hangzhou East–Ningbo and Shanghai Hongqiao–Changsha South, with tickets selling as low as 55% of the published fare — ¥304 and ¥315 on two of those sections, a third below the previous price (People’s Daily, May 2024). High-speed tickets are not in the central pricing catalogue, so operators price them under the Price Law.

Delivery: the promise is the product

In 2025 the postal and express industry moved 198.95 bn express parcels, up 13.6%, for ¥1.5 tn, through 515,000 outlets and 430,000 village-level pickup stations. Average door-to-door time was 51.22 hours, down 2.66 hours on 2024; 87.04% of parcels reached key regions within 72 hours; the public satisfaction score was 85.0. Each person sent or received 141.6 parcels on average (State Post Bureau, 2025 bulletin; 2025 industry figures, January 2026).

The half-hour layer is where the tempo is set. Meituan’s own figures: peak instant-delivery orders hit 98 million in a single day in 2024 (Meituan, March 2025), and by July 2025 its instant-retail peak passed 150 million orders in a day with an average delivery time of 34 minutes across all delivery orders (Meituan, July 2025). The national internet report counted 592 million online meal-ordering users as of December 2024, and 1.029 bn online payment users — 92.8% of all netizens (CNNIC, 55th report, May 2025).

Where the promise comes from

The mechanism that turns capacity into a default is the estimated arrival time. Meituan published its rule in 2021: the number shown to the customer is the longest of four computed times — a model estimate plus three protective buffers built from city characteristics, segment sums and distance. In abnormal cases the system adds time automatically, and in some cities the time point became a time window; a survey of 406,183 users in three pilot cities found a 50.7% drop in the negative-review rate (Meituan algorithm disclosure, September 2021). A separate disclosure describes how an order is assigned: to the rider with slack in their schedule and a route that overlaps what they already carry, with a pilot that waits for the kitchen to report the food is ready before dispatching anyone (Meituan algorithm disclosure, November 2021).

So the half hour is a computed commitment with money behind it.

The labour behind it

Meituan’s 2025 rider report counts 7.45 million annual active riders and 14.5 million active merchants, and cites a projection that industry-wide instant-delivery order volume passes 56 billion for 2025 (Meituan rider report 2024–2025, July 2025). The parcel side runs on an older official figure: the State Post Bureau described “an army of 4 million workers” in the sector in a 2022 retrospective (State Post Bureau, October 2022). Neither the 2025 postal nor the transport bulletin gives a newer headcount.

Why this holds together here

Density puts tens of millions of people inside a route worth running every ten minutes. Labour supply at this scale makes a 34-minute promise affordable, and no developed market can assemble it at short notice. A standard address and a phone that pays removes two steps that slow delivery elsewhere: confirming where, and settling up. State capital builds the fixed cost — ¥901.5 bn on railways in a single year, 199,400 km of expressway on the road side (Ministry of Transport, 2025 bulletin, June 2026).

None of that is culture. It is a set of bills someone is paying.

What the speed costs

The averages hide the distribution. A 34-minute average sits next to Meituan’s own wording, “30-minute delivery for everything”, which its 2025 annual results still use (Meituan, March 2026). The postal figures are not uniform either: a 51.22-hour average and an 87.04% within-72-hour rate, measured only in key regions, mean the half-hour world is an urban one.

Meituan’s 2025 accounts show the price of the contest: ¥364.9 bn revenue and a net loss of ¥23.4 bn, with core local commerce losing ¥6.9 bn (Meituan, March 2026). Its own rider report says it moved to phase out late-delivery deductions for riders by the end of 2025. When a promise is enforced by charging the person who delivers it, the speed is real but the accounting is not settled.

How I checked these numbers

Every figure above comes from a primary document: the annual bulletins of the National Railway Administration, the Ministry of Transport and the State Post Bureau; Meituan’s newsroom, algorithm disclosures and rider report; CNNIC’s report; JR Central’s fact sheet; SNCF’s open data; the World Bank’s 2019 assessment; and rules from 12306 and the CAAC. All were retrieved in October 2026.

My usual extraction service was down, so pages were fetched directly and PDFs converted locally.

Three measurement traps. Punctuality definitions differ by country (departure share, arrival share, delay minutes), so that comparison is indicative, not arithmetic. Fare-per-kilometre figures from 2011–16 are not 2026 prices, and the 2024 reform changed both the published fare and the discount floor, so I report both. Instant-delivery counts mix restaurant orders with instant retail, so the basket is not stable year to year.

What I could not check

Meituan’s 准时宝 late-delivery compensation product. Payout tiers circulate in secondary write-ups, but Meituan’s public rules centre carries no rule for it — its search returns only a buyer-misconduct rule naming 准时宝 as transaction insurance — and the terms appear only in the app.
A current, dated, official punctuality rate for Chinese high-speed rail. The best primary figure remains the World Bank’s 2019 assessment.
A post-2022 official headcount of courier workers. The 4 million figure is from 2022, and the 2025 bulletins stop short of a number.
Ele.me’s own promised-time and compensation rules. Its help centre carries no rule text.
Whether Chinese high-speed station placement has generally moved closer to city centres since the World Bank’s 2019 finding that stations are often built outside downtown.
A newer “over 7 million riders” figure for Meituan on its public index page. That page is client-rendered behind a gate I did not open.

Why there is no Western mini program

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The usual version of this question is about super apps, and it has been answered at length by people with better data than mine; mine is narrower. A mini program is a small bundle of code that runs inside somebody else’s application, and the question is which parts of that arrangement exist in what Apple and Google ship.

I read the vendors’ own documentation for WeChat Mini Programs, Apple App Clips, Google Play Instant and Progressive Web Apps, and compared them on five dimensions: install and size, identity, payment, entry point, distribution and review.

One mechanism carries most of the answer. A mini program brings neither its own user account nor its own checkout. It borrows both from the application hosting it.

The five dimensions, side by side

	WeChat Mini Program	Progressive web app	Native app (iOS/Android)	App Clip (iOS)
Install and size	Runs inside WeChat. Main package 2 MB maximum, all packages together 30 MB (20 MB for programs developed by a third-party provider) (WeChat subpackages, read 2026-10-09)	No package at all. Chrome offers install after HTTPS plus a manifest carrying a name, 192 px and 512 px icons, `start_url` and a display mode (web.dev install criteria, read 2026-10-09)	Full binary from the store. Apple states the App Store limits the size of apps installable over a mobile connection and gives no number on that page (Apple, read 2026-10-09); Google states a compressed download limit of 200 MB for apps published as app bundles (Google, read 2026-10-09)	10 MB uncompressed on iOS 15 and earlier, 15 MB on iOS 16 and earlier, 100 MB on iOS 17 or later under conditions (Apple, read 2026-10-09)
Identity	`openid` per mini program, `unionid` shared across every app under one Open Platform account. Both come from `wx.login` plus `code2Session`, which WeChat documents as returning the UnionID “without user authorization” (login, UnionID, read 2026-10-09)	Each origin keeps its own account. The browser hands nothing to a site silently	Account per app. Sign in with Apple where the app offers it, as an explicit step by the user (Apple, read 2026-10-09)	Sign in with Apple, the keychain and CloudKit, shared with the parent app (Apple, read 2026-10-09)
Payment	WeChat Pay. A merchant number is bound to the mini program’s AppID, at most 50 AppIDs per merchant number (WeChat Pay, page updated 2025-07-02). Virtual goods must go through the mini program virtual-payment channel, where “the platform charges a technical service fee” (WeChat, read 2026-10-09)	Card and wallet APIs called by the merchant, on the merchant’s own acquiring contract	In-app purchase is required to unlock features. Apple’s guidelines name QR codes among the mechanisms that may not be used instead (Apple, read 2026-10-09)	Apple’s in-app purchase. Hosts in the Mini Apps Partner Program “earn 85% of qualifying In-App Purchase sales within qualifying mini apps” (Apple, read 2026-10-09)
Entry	Documented entry paths carry IDs: 1011 scan a QR code, 1012 long-press an image, 1013 pick a code from the album, 1023 the Android home-screen icon, 1005 and 1006 search boxes, 1026 the nearby list, 1183 search inside the PC WeChat mini program panel (WeChat scene values, read 2026-10-09)	A URL, a search result, or a home-screen shortcut the user adds by hand. On iOS there is no install prompt at all (web.dev, read 2026-10-09)	Store search and the home-screen icon	An App Clip Code, NFC tag or QR code at a physical location; Siri suggestions; Maps; Messages; a Smart App Banner on a website in Safari (Apple, read 2026-10-09)
Distribution and review	Published from the mini program console. Virtual payment requires a certified entity: an enterprise, institution or individual merchant (WeChat, read 2026-10-09)	Nothing is submitted. It is HTTPS plus a manifest	Store review against the App Review Guidelines	No listing of its own. It ships inside a full app, which the App Clip documentation says “must include the same functionality as the App Clip” (Apple, read 2026-10-09); Guideline 2.5.16(a) adds that all App Clip features must be in the main app binary and that “App Clips cannot contain advertising” (Apple, read 2026-10-09)

The Android equivalent is gone. “Starting December 2025, Instant Apps cannot be published through Google Play, and all Google Play services Instant APIs will no longer work” (Google Play Instant, last updated 2026-06-24).

Identity arrives before the first screen

The WeChat login flow is one call on the client and one on the server. wx.login returns a code, the server exchanges it through code2Session, and the reply carries an openid for that user in that mini program, a unionid and a session key (WeChat, read 2026-10-09).

The UnionID page says what this costs the user: the developer gets it “without user authorization” (WeChat, read 2026-10-09). No phone number, no password, no consent sheet. The openid is scoped to one mini program; the unionid is identical across every mobile app, website app, official account and mini program bound to the same Open Platform account, so a merchant with several surfaces sees one person.

Compare the alternatives. On the web, an origin cannot read an identifier out of the browser; it asks the user to sign in and then owns a credential to protect. On iOS, an App Clip can use Sign in with Apple and the keychain, which Apple’s documentation points developers at sharing with the full app, but those are technologies an app opts into rather than an identifier handed over at launch.

That is why the first screen of a mini program is the product. Onboarding was paid for at install time, by the host.

Payment is a binding between two accounts

Paying inside a mini program does not mean the mini program holds money. WeChat Pay binds a merchant number to the mini program’s AppID. One merchant number can bind at most 50 AppIDs, the binding starts on the merchant side and is confirmed from the mini program side, and once established cannot be unbound (WeChat Pay, page updated 2025-07-02). The rail and the code package are joined by an account relationship neither side can create alone.

Virtual goods get a second layer. The documentation is blunt: virtual currency, unlocked features, subscription content, paid services, tips and virtual gifts “require integration with Mini Program’s virtual payment system for both purchase and payment”, and the platform charges a technical service fee on the amount (WeChat, read 2026-10-09). Physical goods go through ordinary WeChat Pay; digital ones go through the host’s channel, with the host’s cut.

Apple’s version of that cut is recent and documented. The Mini Apps Partner Program was announced on 13 November 2025 (Apple, 2025-11-13): host apps carrying mini apps can join, earn 85 percent of qualifying in-app purchase sales inside those mini apps, and must use Apple’s in-app purchase system for them (Apple, read 2026-10-09). Admission is not automatic: a host needs the Advanced Commerce API and a manifest describing itself and its mini apps.

Apple’s App Review Guidelines still require in-app purchase to unlock features or functionality, and the same sentence lists QR codes among the mechanisms that cannot substitute for it (Apple, read 2026-10-09). What changed, on 1 May 2025, is that Guidelines 3.1.1, 3.1.1(a), 3.1.3 and 3.1.3(a) were updated for the United States storefront after a court decision about buttons and external links (Apple, 2025-05-01).

The QR code is the offline switch

A WeChat developer does not have to choose between a printed code and a link shared in a chat. The official scene-value table lists both, with IDs: 1011 scanning a QR code, 1012 long-pressing an image, 1013 picking one from the album, 1023 the Android home-screen icon, 1005 and 1006 the two search boxes, 1026 the nearby list, 1183 search inside the PC WeChat mini program panel (WeChat, read 2026-10-09).

Two details make the printed code cheap. Codes come from an API, and WeChat states every generated mini program code is permanently valid. The “one item, one code” interface has no quantity limit and needs a smaller printed area than an ordinary URL code (WeChat, read 2026-10-09). A code already printed and pointing at a URL can be configured to open a chosen page inside a mini program (WeChat, read 2026-10-09). The person scans what is already on the table.

App Clips have the same physical invocations: an App Clip Code, an NFC tag, a QR code at a physical location (Apple, read 2026-10-09). Two constraints pull the other way.

The first constraint trades size against physical entry. The 100 MB ceiling for iOS 17 or later carries four conditions: the App Clip “only supports digital invocations” and not “physical invocations such as App Clip Codes, QR codes, or NFC tags” (Apple, read 2026-10-09), it is used where a reliable connection is likely, and it “doesn’t support iOS 16 and earlier”. The exception Apple names is a demo link from App Store Connect, which may use the 100 MB limit and still support App Clip Codes, NFC tags and QR codes. An App Clip with a counter code stays inside the smaller limit.

The second concerns persistence. Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines say App Clips “remain on the device for a limited amount of time”, and that only App Clip Codes produced in App Store Connect or with Apple’s own code generator are approved for use (Apple, read 2026-10-09). A merchant cannot print its own.

Who reviews it, and who is answerable

Reviews differ in kind as well as in strictness. A PWA is submitted to nobody; Chrome installs it once its manifest and HTTPS satisfy the criteria (web.dev, read 2026-10-09). An App Clip cannot be submitted alone. It ships inside a full app that must already contain the same functionality, cannot carry advertising, and is reviewed as part of that app (Apple, read 2026-10-09). A mini program is submitted inside WeChat, and the entity requirement arrives with payment rather than with the code: to sell virtual items, the program must be a certified enterprise, institution or individual merchant (WeChat, read 2026-10-09).

The commercial consequence: in the App Store, a mini-app-like product reaches users through a host that already has an account relationship and a reviewed app behind it. In WeChat, the party needing the corporate identity, the certification and the merchant binding is the mini program author.

Where the four pieces sit

In WeChat, four things a mini program depends on sit with one owner: the identity system, the payment rail, the entry surface (camera, search, chat, home screen, desktop) and the distribution channel with its review. An author plugs into a host that has all four and pays for the parts it uses.

In the Apple and Google stacks those four are held by parties with different interests. The operating system vendor issues the platform account and runs the payment system; the browser owns the entry surface for web content; the stores own distribution and review; the rail for physical goods sits with the merchant’s bank relationship.

No single party there can hand all four to a third party. Apple’s answer in November 2025 was to supply the missing pieces itself and keep the commission: hosts get Apple’s in-app purchase for mini apps and keep 85 percent of qualifying sales, in exchange for approval, a manifest and Apple’s review.

The mechanism that makes mini programs work is therefore an ownership arrangement rather than a technology gap. Reproducing it outside WeChat means finding one party that holds the users, the identity, the payment rail and the entry surface, and getting it to open all four to third-party code at a price the third party will pay. In the West, the two parties that hold those pieces chose to be the host themselves.

How I checked this

Every figure and quote comes from documentation published by the vendor it describes: WeChat’s mini program and WeChat Pay docs, Apple’s developer documentation, guidelines and news items, Google’s Android documentation, and web.dev.
All pages were fetched on 2026-10-09. Most carry no publication date, so a date beside a source is my reading date unless the page states its own: the WeChat Pay AppID binding page (updated 2025-07-02), the Google Play Instant page (last updated 2026-06-24), Apple’s updated-guidelines news item (2025-05-01), Apple’s Mini Apps Partner Program news item (2025-11-13) and Tencent’s write-up of the 2022 WeChat Open Class (2022-01-07).
Size limits and scene-value IDs come from the pages that state them: WeChat’s subpackage page for 2 MB and 30 MB, Apple’s App Clip page for the 10/15/100 MB table, WeChat’s scene-value table for the ID numbers.
Google Play Instant’s page would not load in a plain HTTP client, so I read it through the Internet Archive and then through a rendering fetch that returned the live page.

What I could not check

The fee WeChat charges on virtual payments. The page says a fee is charged on the payment amount and gives no percentage.
The standard WeChat Pay rate for physical goods. I found no official rate page; what I reached describes partner fee schemes and refers to a merchant rate without the base number.
The extra steps for virtual payment on iOS. WeChat’s virtual payment page says iOS “requires additional activation and adaptation procedures” and points at separate documentation; I could not load that page, so I do not know whether an Apple-side charge is involved.
Whether an App Clip can take payment for physical goods through Apple Pay. Not stated on the App Clip pages I read.
Any current count of mini programs or mini-program daily users. Tencent’s release discloses Weixin monthly accounts and names Mini Games and Mini Shops, but carries no mini-program count. The most recent first-party figure I found: more than 450 million daily users at the end of 2021, from Tencent’s write-up of the 2022 WeChat Open Class (Tencent, 2022-01-07). That figure is four years old.
What “certified Mini Program” requires in practice, beyond the entity types named on the virtual payment page, and how long WeChat’s review takes.

Twenty hot lists, no API keys

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every night at 04:30 a script on this machine collects the current front page of 20 platforms (Zhihu, Bilibili, V2EX, Hupu, Maoyan, Hacker News, Lobsters, GitHub, Reddit, YouTube, arXiv and a few tech news feeds), translates the English headlines into Chinese, builds a static site and pushes it. There is no server and no database. The output is a set of JSON files and a single-page app that reads them.

I have no API keys for most of these platforms, and for the ones that do offer keys, I did not want to create accounts for a hobby project. That constraint produced the most useful part of the system: a catalogue of what each source actually gives you, and a record of how each one broke. This is that record. It is more useful than the feature list.

The sources that broke, and what the failure was really about

Reddit, first attempt. There was a trick where you request translate.google.com/translate?u=<reddit url> and read the translated page, which passes through Reddit’s HTML. It worked for months and then started returning a 302 to translate.goog, which serves a shell with no posts in it. The failure looked like a parser bug. It was a removed feature.

Reddit, second attempt. The official Atom feed, r/popular/hot/.rss, works and needs no key. Two traps: geo_filter=GLOBAL has to be present, or the feed comes back localised to the country your request exits from, and mine exits from a node that made the whole page German. And the feed carries no score and no comment count, so those fields are simply absent from my data rather than zero.

Reddit, third attempt, which is where it ends. Scores are available through the JSON API if you have OAuth credentials. I opened the app-creation form, submitted it, and got {"success": true} back, while the applications list stayed empty. Their documentation has since moved new legacy-Data-API apps to an application process for moderation use cases. Unauthenticated .json returns 403 from anything that looks like a datacenter address: direct, through a proxy, and with a browser TLS fingerprint that makes the request look like Chrome. Two public mirrors were dead ends as well, one of which now wants to be paid and explicitly refuses automated clients, and the other of which returns /r/popular posts from 2015.

There is a path that works: send the request with a logged-in browser’s cookies. I measured it, got a real score back, and decided not to use it. The data is not worth building the pipeline on something the platform’s terms do not allow.

arXiv. The API started answering with a 14-byte body, 429 "Rate exceeded.", for every query, from every route. Not occasional throttling: the endpoint was closed to my traffic entirely. The official RSS feeds for cs.AI, cs.LG and cs.CL serve the same listing without a key. The endpoint is still in the code as a fallback, and I expect to delete it.

36Kr. The page is entirely client-rendered, so the extractor’s basic mode returns {"results": [], "failed_results": [{"error": "Error fetching content"}]}. The old code read results[0] and raised an IndexError, which the pipeline caught as a platform failure and handled by keeping yesterday’s data. So for weeks the site showed a platform labelled “AI news” that was quietly a day or two out of date. The fix was one parameter, extract_depth: advanced. The bug was the exception handling that turned a hard failure into a silent stale one.

The night the whole thing hung

One night no platform updated. The cron entry reported a timeout after 3600 seconds and the captured output was empty.

Nothing was wrong with the network: I could see every platform’s connection being made in the proxy log at 04:30, and then no connections at all for the next 55 minutes. Nothing had reached the build step either, which I could tell from one log file’s modification time. The script was alive and doing nothing, and I had no idea where.

Two things had made that state undiagnosable. Python buffers stdout when it is not attached to a terminal, so when the process was killed, every line it had printed died with it. And urlopen(timeout=N) applies to each socket read rather than the whole request, so a slow response can stall for far longer than the timeout suggests.

The fix is unglamorous: exec </dev/null so no child can block on stdin, python3 -u so output survives a kill, a timeout around every step, a translation budget, and a step log that records a timestamp as each stage starts. The next failure will be somewhere specific in that log.

A successful job is not fresh data

This is the lesson I would keep if I could keep only one. “The task exited 0” and “the data is from today” are different claims, and a pipeline that only reports the first one will lie to you quietly for weeks. So there is a separate check: it reads every platform’s JSON, compares its date with today, and exits non-zero if any source is stale or empty. It does not care that the fetch succeeded.

The same principle shows up in the summary step. A model writes the “today’s focus” card, reading the top five items from each platform, and it is asked to return only item identifiers and a reason. The script then looks up each identifier and fills in the title and URL from the data it already has. The model never writes a link, so it cannot invent one. If the summary fails, the old one stays on the page marked stale.

Where the ordering is not what it looks like

Three caveats, since the site presents these lists as rankings:

Hupu’s “hot” list is a weighted stream rather than a sorted list of numbers. There is no score to sort by.
36Kr and TechCrunch are editorially ordered. The order is theirs, not a measurement.
V2EX’s public hot endpoint returns about nine items on a good day.

The site says which list is which on each platform page. A ranking whose method is unstated is just a list.

Reproducing this

The collector is Python, one function per platform, and the run prints a report. The interesting part to copy is not the fetching. It is the two checks around it: a freshness check that fails when data is old even though the job succeeded, and a generation step where the model returns only identifiers that the script resolves into real URLs.

Verifying an email signup end to end

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This site has a signup form and a double opt-in. When you submit it, the mailing tool sends you a confirmation email, and until you click the link in that email you are not on the list.

I wanted to know whether that actually worked, so I ran the loop once, with a real address, and checked the state at each step. Here is what “checked” meant, and the failure that only showed up at the far end.

What the states look like

The tool has two states that matter: Unconfirmed and Active. A new signup lands in Unconfirmed, does not appear in the default list of subscribers, and does not count towards the group’s size. That is correct behaviour for double opt-in, and it is also the single most confusing thing about the setup: the list looks empty right after a successful signup.

So the check is not “did the count go up”. It is a sequence:

Submit the form on the live site, from the live site’s own page, and read the response. Mine came back {"success": true} and the page replaced the form with a thank-you message.
Open the subscriber record and read four fields: status Unconfirmed, the source line naming the form, the group it was added to, and the activity entry that says it was added.
Check the campaign report for the confirmation email and confirm its sent counter moved from 1 to 2. The number matters: a signup that produces no outgoing mail is a broken loop that looks like a working one.
Wait for the recipient to click the link, then read the record again and watch the status move to Active, the group count move with it, and the unconfirmed count go back to zero.

Only after step 4 is the pipeline verified. Steps 1 to 3 prove the plumbing; step 4 proves the part a reader actually performs.

The thing that failed was the inbox

The confirmation email was sent. It never arrived.

The address in question was a QQ Mail account, and QQ Mail silently drops mail from foreign senders. No bounce, no spam folder entry, nothing in the logs on my side. The mailing tool reported a successful send, and it was telling the truth.

This is worth stating plainly because it is invisible from the sending side. Every dashboard I can look at says the email left. The only way to learn otherwise is to ask the person at the other end, and a signup flow that depends on them telling you is a signup flow that will lose readers without ever showing an error. The practical fixes are ordinary ones: tell people which folder to check, use a mailbox you trust for your own tests, and expect some fraction of a list to be unreachable through no fault of your own.

Two smaller traps

The dashboard’s copy was arguing with the site. The embedded form ships with a default headline and the line “Signup for news and special offers!”, which is roughly the opposite of what this site promises. The form editor is a client-rendered app, and synthetic clicks from a scripted browser do not reach its text-editing state, so there was no clean programmatic fix. I hid those two elements in CSS and let the site’s own heading stand. That is a workaround and it is labelled as one in the stylesheet.

The status filter is not a native control. Selecting “Unconfirmed” means clicking a custom overlay, and clicking where the option was last time lands on nothing, because the menu re-renders. What works: send an Escape first in case the menu is already open, click the trigger, re-read the option’s coordinates after it opens, and then click. The confirmation that the filter is applied is a line of text reading which status is being shown, not the menu’s own state.

Cleaning up after yourself

The test created subscriber records in a real account, so the last step was deleting them, which is also the step that is easy to skip. I kept two addresses deliberately, for future sends: the one that can receive foreign mail and the one that cannot. Knowing which is which is useful the next time a confirmation email “sends successfully”.

What I would still verify

Payment. The support page has a working button and a payment page that returns 200, and I have never completed a real transaction through it. Until I do, the honest description of that button is “untested”, not “working”. The same standard applies here: the signup was verified end to end because a person on the other side clicked a link and the state changed. Anything less than that is a hope with a green tick next to it.

What this site actually ships, and the widget I can't remove

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The front page of this site is a 2,130-byte HTML document containing 91 elements. I wrote 1,022 bytes of JavaScript for it, in two inline blocks, and I have no build step that could hide anything else. That is the whole page: text, a stylesheet, two typefaces.

Then you scroll to the signup form, and jQuery 3.7.1 arrives.

How I measured it

Not from the build output. Build output tells you what you shipped, not what a browser fetched. I opened the live site in headless Chrome, attached to it over the DevTools protocol, and read performance.getEntriesByType('resource') plus the navigation timing entry.

The page, from my line:

document: 2,130 bytes encoded, 91 elements in the DOM
same-origin requests: 4. Stylesheet 3,498 B, Inter 48,556 B, Newsreader 132,300 B, favicon 469 B
JavaScript I wrote: 1,022 B, in two inline <script> blocks (255 B to set the theme before first paint, 767 B for the toggle)
there is also a 309-byte inline <script type="application/ld+json">, which is data for search engines rather than code

And the signup widget, which is a third-party embed:

9 requests to MailerLite’s CDN
225,273 bytes downloaded, of which 223,312 bytes is JavaScript: jQuery 87,532 B, the widget’s own loader 52,683 B, an input-mask bundle 70,970 B, a form renderer 12,127 B
the remaining ~2 KB is two small stylesheets

So the form costs about 100 times my own HTML in JavaScript, on every page that shows it.

Two honest caveats on those numbers. Cross-origin responses report transferSize: 0 unless the server sends Timing-Allow-Origin, so the widget’s bytes came from curl against the six asset URLs, not from the browser’s own accounting. And the timings came from my machine, over a tunnel: document response started at 1,593 ms, DOM ready at 2,151 ms, and the load event at 9,526 ms. That last number is the widget too. None of these three timings are what you would see.

Why the typefaces are mine to serve

The two font files are the heaviest thing I send you, and they are the part I am most confident about. They are subsets: Inter at 48 KB, Newsreader at 132 KB, latin ranges only, no third-party request, no DNS lookup to someone else’s CDN, and a 6-month Cache-Control from my own host.

I could have linked to a font CDN instead. I decided not to, for a reason I can state precisely: I cannot verify that CDN from where my readers are. I also cannot verify it from where I am. When I benchmarked a list of hosts from this machine, Google Fonts answered in about a second, which looks like proof that nothing is blocked, except that my machine routes everything through a tunnel: a request to a foreign host leaves from a Tokyo exit node, and only requests to Chinese hosts leave from my actual ISP address. Two different addresses are answering me depending on which host I ask, and both of them are reported as “direct”.

That is the useful lesson here, and it cost me a wrong sentence earlier in this project. A test that does not tell you which way the packets left is not a reachability test. So the font files ship with the site, where the only network path involved is the one that already delivered the page.

The failure worth writing down

I styled the widget to match the site and pushed it. The button stayed black. In dark mode the email field stayed white.

MailerLite’s stylesheet writes its rules with the form’s container id and !important: #mlb2-46888919.ml-form-embedContainer ... .ml-form-embedSubmit button { background-color: #000 !important }. My override was .newsletter .ml-form-embedSubmit button, which has two classes. An id plus four classes beats two classes no matter how many !important flags I add, because !important only settles ties inside the same specificity tier.

The fix is boring: repeat the same id in my selector and add one more class, so my rule wins on specificity and then on !important. The interesting part is that the screenshot looked fine. A black button on a light page looks like a design choice. I only caught it because I stopped looking at pixels and asked the browser for computed values:

getComputedStyle(document.querySelector('.ml-embedded button[type=submit]')).backgroundColor
// "rgb(0, 0, 0)"  -> my stylesheet was not applying at all

Both rounds after that, light and dark, I asserted on computed colours, and kept the screenshots for layout only. Pixels are for judging whether something looks right. They are a bad instrument for finding out whether your CSS is in the cascade.

What I would do about the 220 KB

Defer it. The widget only has to exist when a reader scrolls to it or clicks it, and the page can load the embed then instead of in the <head>. That is the next change I want to make here, and when it is done I will re-run the same measurement and put both numbers in this post, including the case where it does not help.

Until then the honest statement is: this site has no framework, no bundler, no client-side router, no analytics, and about a kilobyte of JavaScript that I wrote. The one third-party script on it is a newsletter form, and it is heavier than everything else on the page put together.

Reproducing this

The measurement is a CDP script: open the page in headless Chrome, enable the Network domain, read performance.getEntriesByType('resource'), then curl -o /dev/null -w '%{size_download}' the asset URLs to get the cross-origin bytes the Resource Timing API refuses to report. If you want to compare your own site, the part that matters is the last step. Browser-side byte counts for third-party assets are usually 0, and it is easy to read that as “the widget is free”.

What goes on this site, and what does not

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Most writing about AI tooling is written by people who watched a demo. This site is written by someone who runs the same task book against five tools, then reads the 39 acceptance checks line by line to find out which ones passed for the wrong reason.

That difference is the whole point, and it comes with a cost: it is slower. So the rules here.

One long post every two weeks, not three short ones a week. Each post has to contain something a reader can re-run, copy, or argue against — a task book, a scoring rule, a failure taxonomy, the script that computed the number.

The three posts published alongside this one are an opening batch. The fortnightly rhythm starts after them.

Numbers come from scripts, not from impressions. If a post says a tool passed 39 out of 39, there is a script that produced that 39, and I will say what it could not see. Where I have not verified something, the post says so in those words.

No employer internals. The method is mine to publish; the data is not. Anything under an NDA, any customer ticket, and any internal number stays out.

If it breaks on the third run, the post says so. The failure mode is usually the most useful sentence in the whole piece.

If that sounds like the kind of thing you want in your inbox, the signup form is on the front page. Until then, the posts page is where everything lands.