How we compile, check and correct

The most important thing first

ZhongAuto's news is compiled by an automated pipeline using AI models. Most articles are published without a person reading them first. We control quality with rules and gates, and we correct or take down what turns out to be wrong — but that is not the same as an editor checking every piece. Read each article as a summary that points to the original report, and rely on the original and on official sources for anything that matters.

What we cover

Chinese car brands and China's auto industry abroad: launches and pricing, dealers and distribution, sales, policy and tariffs, local production, safety and compliance. Stories with no tie to Chinese cars are out of scope, even when they come from an outlet we follow.

Sources

We follow around thirty outlets: local motoring press in about twenty markets, plus English- and Chinese-language media that cover China's auto industry. Before adding an outlet we check that its robots rules allow fetching the pages involved.

Every compiled article names the outlet it came from and links to the original. We do not republish source text and we do not use source outlets' photos.

How articles are compiled

An AI model writes a summary of the source in English and in Chinese. The rules: write in its own words rather than translating sentence by sentence; quote at most one short phrase, in quotation marks; take every number, date, price and quotation from the source and add no fact that isn't there.

Models make mistakes. Typical ones are getting a model name wrong, treating a preview as a launch, or dropping a qualifier the source included. Where an article and its source disagree, the source is right.

What it takes to publish

An article publishes directly only if it is clearly about a Chinese brand or China's auto industry, does not repeat an event the site has already covered, meets a minimum length, and the model reports confidence in its reading of the source.

Anything else is rejected or held for review. Held articles stay out of listings, the sitemap and the newsletter until they are released or taken down.

Market roundups and the export brief

The weekly market roundups and the export brief are the site's own pieces, published under the ZhongAuto name. They are also written by AI, working only from articles already published on the site that week. Every fact in them links to the individual report it came from, which in turn links to its original source.

They are synthesis, not independent reporting. The judgments in them — what the week's main thread was, for instance — are readings of that week's coverage, not knowledge from outside it.

Images

Images come only from freely licensed collections such as Wikimedia Commons. They are illustrative: a picture may show another model from the same brand, or a different model year or trim, rather than the exact car in the story.

Vehicle data and tools

Specifications and prices in the model database are taken from official brand pages and public market information, with the source noted on each entry. The duty and tax rates behind the landed-cost calculator are directional research, not a customs basis; confirm real costs with local customs, a dealer or a qualified adviser.

The advisor ranks cars by published rules — see how recommendations work.

Independence

ZhongAuto currently takes no advertising, sponsorship or dealer commission. No brand can pay to affect whether an article is published, where it appears, or what the advisor recommends. If that changes, this page will say so and the content involved will be labeled.

Corrections and takedowns

When we find a factual error, off-topic content or a rights problem, we correct or take down the article. A taken-down article no longer appears on the site and its address returns 404.

We are setting up a public contact address and will publish it on this page.