Which industry tree should you use for China equities?

Short answer: pick one publisher and stay inside it. ChinaScope Reference carries five independent industry schemes in a single table, and they are separate trees rather than levels of one hierarchy. Mixing them in one grouping produces a result that looks like a sector breakdown and means nothing.

Five schemes, one table, no common trunk

dict_industry holds 3,170 nodes across five standard schemes, so a company can be grouped under whichever industry taxonomy a team already uses. The schemes are CSF, GB/T, SYWG across two revisions, and CSRC. (ChinaScope Reference, as described in the July 2026 profile.)

The profile's instruction is blunt: select one industry publisher before joining. The five schemes are independent trees, and mixing them in a single hierarchy is meaningless. There is no shared root to fall back on and nothing in the data will stop you.

SmarTag classifies on a sixth, its own GICS-style industry scheme of 126 industries. That is a different question again, being what the news article is about rather than what the company registered as. (Data cut 2026-09-16.)

Industry is not the same question as product

An industry scheme says what kind of company this is. The ChinaScope Product Taxonomy says what it actually makes and sells, and the two do not substitute for one another. Segment revenue, the supply-chain graph and primary-product designations all speak the product taxonomy, not an industry tree.

To group product nodes to any level, use the ancestors path rather than recursively resolving parent. It gets you to any level in one step. (July 2026 profile.)

The depth you can reach is set by what companies disclosed

Companies disclose each line of business at a single chosen depth. A carmaker reports "passenger vehicles", not "sedans" and "SUVs" separately. Upper levels 1 to 3 are densely populated in the segment data; levels 5 and below are sparse.

Roll up to a parent level for coverage. Aggregation reconstructs upper totals, but it cannot invent detail a company never disclosed, so a screen written at level 5 is not a strict screen, it is a screen over whichever companies happened to report that deep. (ChinaScope Product Taxonomy, July 2026 profile.)

Two roll-up traps once you have picked a tree

A subtree total that looks additive. In fin_secu_sam_product_calc, product_income is a subtree roll-up, so a parent node's value already includes its children and summing across taxonomy nodes double-counts. Use product_b_income, the direct block figure, when you need additive segment revenue. (ChinaScope SAM, data cut 2026-02-26.)

Detail and total tables that are not a hierarchy. In Relationships (PIT), internal_guaranty_detail and internal_guaranty_total, with their external and entrusted-investment counterparts, are disclosed separately by the filer. Adding detail lines to a total double-counts. (Data cut 2026-08-23.)