China

What's verified

China's State Cryptography Administration (SCA / 国家密码管理局), the country's national cryptography regulator, published Announcement No. 46 on 12-13 December 2023, releasing application guidelines for the first batch of projects under its National Cryptography Science Fund. The guidelines explicitly scope research funding toward post-quantum cryptography: "针对'先存储后解密'攻击，研究现役密码协议与抗量子公钥密码算法的融合技术" (targeting "harvest now, decrypt later" attacks, research integration techniques between incumbent cryptographic protocols and quantum-resistant public-key cryptography), and call for research on "密码基础设施、密码设备抗量子迁移的总体技术架构" (overall technical architecture for quantum-resistant migration of cryptographic infrastructure and devices).

This is a real, dated, SCA-authored document specifically addressing PQC, not a restatement of NIST's or any other body's targets, and not the previously circulated but unsupported claim (in an earlier version of this page) attributing a five-year plan and SM-series details to SCA without a verifiable source. It funds research rather than mandating migration, and does not define a CBOM-equivalent inventory artifact.

China's two governing statutes say nothing about quantum

We read both laws that actually govern cryptography in China, in full. The Commercial Cryptography Regulations (State Council Order No. 760, effective 1 July 2023) and the Cryptography Law of the PRC (effective 1 January 2020) contain zero occurrences of "quantum," "anti-quantum," or "post-quantum" in any form, in either document, from first article to last. Chapter 2 of the Regulations, the chapter on science, technology, and standardization, speaks only in algorithm-neutral terms about promoting "indigenous innovation in commercial cryptography." Whatever China eventually requires on post-quantum migration, it is not yet written into the statutes that set its cryptography rules.

Neither national standards registry has a post-quantum standard

We checked both of China's national standards catalogues directly rather than sampling search results. The 密码行业标准化技术委员会 (Cryptography Industry Standardization Technical Committee) publishes the complete list of all 177 current GM/T standards; we pulled the full catalogue and searched it for post-quantum content. The only quantum-related entries are GM/T 0108-2021 and GM/T 0114-2021, both specifications for BB84 quantum key distribution hardware — a physics-layer key-distribution technology, not a post-quantum algorithm. Every other apparent match was a drafting organisation's company name (several Chinese firms have "quantum" in their name) rather than a standard's actual content.

The national GB/T registry gives the same answer. Searching it directly for "anti-quantum," "post-quantum," and "lattice-based cryptography" each returned zero results, against a working search endpoint that returns real results for adjacent terms like "quantum key distribution" (27 hits) and "cryptography" generally (58 hits). The only two quantum-security GB/T standards, both published 2026, are again quantum key distribution security requirements, not post-quantum cryptography.

The algorithm competition's own deadline has passed

ICCS launched its national algorithm-selection competition in February 2025, explicitly framed as a response to the quantum threat: "为应对量子计算威胁，推动新一代商用密码算法标准制定" ("in order to respond to the threat of quantum computing, and to advance the formulation of next-generation commercial cryptographic algorithm standards"). The formal call for public-key proposals, issued 9 October 2025, set a hard deadline: "算法提案的提交截止时间为北京时间2026年6月30日24时" ("the submission deadline for algorithm proposals is 24:00 Beijing time on 30 June 2026"), after which ICCS said it would conduct a formality review and publish the candidates advancing to a first round of evaluation.

That deadline is now more than two months past, and no candidate list, shortlist, or result has been published. The competition is, if anything, expanding rather than concluding: ICCS opened a third track, for block ciphers, on 4 September 2026, at the same draft-requirements-for-comment stage the public-key track was at in February 2025. A Chinese national post-quantum standard remains, on the government's own timeline, still to be selected.

The one substantive 2026 action: funding migration research, not requiring it

SCA's Announcement No. 55, issued 30 January 2026, is the most specific PQC document SCA has published. It opens a second batch of National Cryptography Science Fund grants, including a dedicated research direction on "抗量子计算密码关键理论与技术" (key theory and technology of anti-quantum-computing cryptography) covering code-based and isogeny-based algorithm security, and a second direction specifically on migration: "典型关键信息基础设施抗量子计算密码迁移敏捷性关键技术" (key technologies for anti-quantum-computing cryptographic migration agility in typical critical information infrastructure). Funded deliverables include a tool for automatically identifying vulnerable RSA/ECC cryptography in source and binary code, and prototype cryptographic modules supporting multiple anti-quantum public-key algorithms with dynamic reconfiguration.

This is a research-funding call, not a migration mandate: it sets no deadline for any CII operator, imposes no compliance obligation, and creates no enforcement mechanism. But it is a genuine signal of state priority, and notably, China is funding tooling to discover vulnerable cryptography and support migration before it has selected the algorithm that migration would move to.