China Data Security Law (DSL) 21: Art. 21 Classify and grade data, identify important data by the catalogues, and apply the stricter regime to national core data

The state's categorised and classified protection system grades data by its importance to economic and social development and the harm that alteration, destruction, leakage or unlawful acquisition or use would cause to national security, public interests or lawful rights; the national data security coordination mechanism has the departments formulate a catalogue of important data, each locality, department, industry and sector prepares its specific catalogue and gives listed data priority protection, and data concerning national security, the lifelines of the national economy, important aspects of people's livelihoods and major public interests are national core data under a stricter management regime; a processor therefore classifies its data, identifies its important data against the applicable catalogues (and files it under the 2025 Regulations) and applies the core-data rules where they reach it.