You may have missed this one. It landed in February, and most of the brand teams I speak to in Paris and Milan still call it “the new Chinese livestream restrictions”. That phrasing is doing quiet damage. The text is not a restriction on you. It is a restriction on the people you were losing to.
What actually came into force on 1 February 2026
The Live-Streaming E-Commerce Supervision and Management Measures (直播电商监督管理办法) took effect on 1 February 2026. It was published as Order No. 117 on 18 December 2025 by the State Administration for Market Regulation and the Cyberspace Administration of China, and it is the sector’s first dedicated regulation rather than a set of rules borrowed from advertising and e-commerce law. Sohu gave a useful early read of what it means for platforms, streamers and shoppers.
The text names four parties and gives each its own duties: the platform, the livestream room operator, the streamer, and the agency behind the streamer.
Platforms verify room operators’ credentials before they broadcast, re-check the registration file every six months, and verify a streamer’s identity before their first stream. They report operator and streamer data to their provincial regulator each January and July, monitor broadcasts in real time, and can throttle traffic, cut a stream or close an account.
Room operators must show seller information continuously on the live page, pre-approve the account name, the set and the props, and correct a misstatement on air while keeping the record. Article 32 requires the product name, price and unit of measure to be displayed prominently, and any promotion to state the comparison price or the basis of the reduction. Article 34 bans false or misleading claims about the seller, the product’s performance, quality, sales figures, user reviews, awards or qualifications.
Article 37 is the one to read twice. Where a room operator uses AI-generated human images or video to sell, the AI origin must be labelled and disclosed to the consumer continuously, and the room operator carries the legal liability for what that avatar says.
The part nobody put in the press summary
Enforcement did not wait for the text. On 28 November 2025 the regulator published its fourth batch of live-commerce cases. One concerned the streamer known as Taiyuan Laoge, with more than 90 million followers. His company was fined a cumulative 5.6 million RMB by the Taiyuan authorities between April and August 2025, for unprovable and exaggerated claims across more than thirty products, and for comparing its prices against reference prices it could not substantiate, as China News Service reported. The offence was not selling a bad product. It was the price comparison and the adjectives.
Three mechanical things follow, and none of them is stated plainly in the text.
Liability moved down, not up. The room operator answers first. Analysts at Fangda Partners describe the split as platforms acting as gatekeepers, room operators carrying front-line responsibility, and agencies picking up independent duties they did not have before. If the room runs on your brand’s account, the room operator is your brand.
An AI host is not a streamer. Fangda’s reading is that virtual anchors sit outside the definition of live marketing personnel altogether, so they carry no personal duties. Every obligation lands on the operator running them. Deploy a digital host on Douyin, let it overstate a fabric claim, and there is nobody else in the chain to point at.
Monitoring is tiered. Your exposure depends on your streamer’s follower count, your transaction volume and your product risk category. Fashion, jewellery and beauty are watched categories. A small brand working with a very large host inherits that host’s tier.
The precedent matters. Chinese regulators have run this sequence before: publish typical cases, let the industry self-correct, then codify what stuck. Codification is the last step, not the first.
What stays unclear is worth naming honestly. The Measures require “prominent” display without defining a size, placement or duration. Training is mandatory but its content is undefined. The catch-all in Article 24 leaves private-domain selling, WeChat groups and mini-programs, to enforcement discretion. Cross-border sellers shipping from outside the mainland, and small streamers below the reporting thresholds, are where the reach is least tested. I would not assume those gaps stay open.
Why your brand is now less disadvantaged than it was
Here is the honest version of the last five years. If your brand refused to shout, you lost. The room next door promised the lowest price anywhere, guaranteed authenticity in absolute terms, ran a countdown clock and called the product top-tier. You could not match that without damaging what you spent decades building.
Those three tactics are now the ones under enforcement pressure. The unverifiable superlative, the fabricated reference price, the authenticity guarantee nobody can evidence. A brand that never wanted to use them has just had its competition’s advantage taken away.
Who this affects: anyone selling through a third-party host, an agency-run room, or an AI presenter. Who it barely touches: brands running quiet own-account broadcasts with a product manager on camera. If that is you, you were early by accident.
The window matters. Platforms are rewriting operator agreements across 2026 and agencies are renegotiating talent contracts. Terms you set this autumn will hold for two seasons. The cost of doing nothing is not a fine. It is inheriting a liability you never priced, attached to words you never approved.
A French leather goods house I work with had turned down Douyin twice, because every proposal it received was built on a discount ladder and a “best price of the season” hook. This spring they ran four broadcasts with no price claim at all. Just the workshop, the hide, the stitching, and a question box. Conversion per minute came in below what their previous agency had modelled. Average basket was meaningfully higher, and returns ran at roughly a third of their Tmall flagship rate. Not a heroic result. A workable one, and repeatable.
What to put in the contract, and how to brief
Six things, in order.
1. Establish who the room operator is, in writing. If the broadcast runs on your brand’s account, it is you, and no clause changes that. If your agency streams from its own account, it is them, and the contract should say so explicitly.
2. Write a claim list before you write a script. A positive list of what may be said about materials, origin, care and provenance, with the evidence for each. A negative list of what may never be said. Superlatives, absolute authenticity guarantees and any comparative price go on the negative list by default.
3. Handle price separately. If any reference price appears on screen, require the basis to be named and documented before the broadcast. This is the most-enforced provision in the whole area.
4. Add an AI clause even if you have no plans for AI. Agencies slot virtual hosts into off-peak hours more often than they mention. Require continuous labelling, require written notice before any generated presenter appears, and put the indemnity in the same paragraph.
5. Agree the correction protocol. Decide before the stream who calls a correction, what the wording is, and where the log lives. Keep your own recording rather than relying on the platform’s retention.
6. Build the substantiation file first. Certifications, import documents, test reports, evidence for every claim on the positive list. Assembled before the broadcast, not after a complaint.
On in-house versus agency: if you run two or three broadcasts a month, keep them on your own account with your own team. The liability already sits with you, so the contracting problem disappears. If you run weekly with named talent, an agency earns its fee, but only one that will sign the claim list and the indemnity without negotiating them down. An agency that will not put its streamer’s words in writing has told you something. Briefing and contracting is the part of our KOL and influencer work in China that changed most this year, more than casting ever did.
The question I keep arguing about
If the superlatives and the price hooks are gone, does live commerce still convert for premium fashion, or does it quietly turn into a brand medium with a shopping cart attached?
Some colleagues of mine think the format was the discount, and that removing one removes the other. I am not convinced. If you ran Douyin broadcasts this spring, I would rather hear your numbers than my own theory. Tell me in the comments.