China Tests ‘Scan-And-Fly’ Drone Clearance In Shanghai And Sichuan As Beijing Stays Locked Down

China is rolling out a WeChat fast-track for low-risk drone flights in Shanghai and Sichuan, the same week reporting confirmed its capital remains under a near-total flight ban. The split tells you everything about how Beijing now governs the technology it dominates: permissive where it wants commercial volume, locked down where it wants control. The new mini-program, called “scan-and-fly,” lets operators inside designated pilot zones check flight locations, altitude limits, and aircraft specs, then log a flight without the layered approval process that used to apply.

I’ve been covering China’s drone rules since 2023, when the country published its first national framework, and the pattern has only sharpened. The government talks up a trillion-yuan low-altitude economy while local police call hobbyists the moment a DJI Mini powers on. Scan-and-fly is the other half of that contradiction. It is the carrot that sits next to the stick.

Scan-And-Fly Streamlines Clearance Inside Fixed Pilot Zones

The scan-and-fly mini-program gives consumer and light-duty drone operators a streamlined declaration path inside designated zones, replacing the multi-step approval that previously applied even in airspace where flying was nominally permitted. State news agency Xinhua reported the model on Monday, citing China’s central air traffic management office, in coverage relayed by the South China Morning Post. The platform shows users where they can fly, the altitude ceiling, and which aircraft are allowed before they log a flight.

Yu Jingbing, founder of the Shenzhen-based Global Hawk drone training center, told Xinhua the system vastly simplified declaration procedures for consumer and light-duty drones in fixed zones. This helps expand drone applications and provides a strong boost to the low-altitude economy, Yu said. He framed the tool as a direct answer to operator demand across what he called the sector’s four pillars: inspection, agricultural spraying, logistics, and tourism. Operators in those fields needed a fast way to get clearance in low-risk, unpopulated areas, and the old process did not provide one.

The friction Yu describes is real. Under a provisional regulation enacted in 2023, places like Shenzhen and Hainan set up zones where micro, light, and small drones below certain weight limits could fly freely under 120 meters (394 feet). Cargo lifting, heavier aircraft, and any flight above that ceiling still required separate approvals inside those same zones. Scan-and-fly is built to clear the backlog of routine, low-altitude requests without a human in the loop for every flight, the kind of airspace digitization Beijing has been racing to scale.

Shanghai Already Opened Nearly Half The City To Permission-Free Flying

Shanghai moved first and moved big. Starting February 1, the city let registered operators fly micro, light, and small drones in designated zones without filing advance paperwork. City officials told a January briefing reported by Shanghai outlet ThePaper.cn that the free-fly zones cover roughly 46 percent of the city’s territory. [VERIFY: 46% figure and the 220,000 / 800-company / 3.2M-flights numbers below all trace to the city briefing via ThePaper.cn, relayed in English-language wire coverage. Swap in a direct ThePaper.cn or Shanghai government URL before publishing.] Operators submit flight plans and book practice slots through the Suishenban government app, which also maps where flying is allowed and where it is restricted. The city set aside three parks as practice areas, including the Shanghai Botanical Garden.

The scale behind that policy is what makes it notable. By the end of 2025, Shanghai counted 220,000 registered drones and close to 800 drone companies, and aircraft flew 3.2 million times in the city across the year. That is a regulator responding to volume it can no longer process by hand. Sichuan followed, rolling out a second batch of pilot airspace on May 4 under its own scan-to-fly program.

The national fleet numbers explain the urgency. China had 3.287 million registered drones by the end of 2025, a 51 percent jump year over year, according to the Civil Aviation Administration of China. Cumulative flight hours hit 45.3 million for the year, up nearly 70 percent. No approval system staffed by people keeps pace with growth like that, which is the practical argument for automating the routine cases.

Beijing Went The Opposite Direction With A Near-Total Ban

While Shanghai opened up, Beijing shut down. In March the municipal government declared the entire capital controlled airspace, meaning every outdoor drone flight now requires explicit approval. A separate set of rules that took effect May 1 banned the sale, rental, and storage of consumer drones and core components inside the city, with a registration deadline that forced existing owners to log their equipment with police by April 30.

The timing of Beijing’s clampdown was brutal for DJI. The world’s largest drone maker is fighting the U.S. Federal Communications Commission in the Ninth Circuit, where its February 20 petition for review argues the agency never identified a specific security threat before placing DJI on its Covered List. DJI’s April brief put the projected cost of the FCC action at $1.56 billion for 2026, with 39 products sidelined. Then its own capital city told residents they could not legally store more than a handful of its drones at home. The squeeze runs on both sides of the Pacific at once.

The Crackdown On Drone-Unlocking Software Runs Parallel To The Carrot

Beijing’s enforcement arm has been busy while the carrot rolled out. China’s Ministry of Public Security announced in mid-May that police had arrested 16 people across 10 cases tied to hacking drone systems, part of a nationwide “Clean Skies” campaign the ministry launched in December. The suspects, arrested between January and March, were accused of selling technical workarounds that stripped altitude caps and no-fly-zone restrictions from drones.

The biggest case ran out of Shanghai and involved more than 100 drones. According to the ministry, a 40-year-old man surnamed Li had been building software to bypass drone restrictions since 2022 and selling it through e-commerce platforms. A ministry official warned that privately removing no-fly-zone and altitude limits for drone owners may itself be a criminal offense. From this year, penalties for unauthorized flights escalated from fines to administrative detention of up to 10 days, and up to 15 days for illegal border crossings.

Read together, the two moves are coherent rather than contradictory. Scan-and-fly clears the compliant, low-risk operator quickly, and Clean Skies puts the people defeating the geofence in detention. Both run through the same centralized system that logs every flight. The easier path and the harsher penalty are pulling toward the same goal, which is total visibility of who is flying what, and where.

DroneXL’s Take

This is the same machine running two programs. When I wrote in April that China was grounding its own pilots even as it funded a low-altitude economy, the open question was how Beijing would reconcile the two impulses. Scan-and-fly is the answer, and it is not a softening. It is a sorting mechanism. Compliant flights get waved through a WeChat screen; non-compliant ones get a knock on the door. The connective tissue is a flight log the state reads in real time, the same infrastructure-first architecture the United States does not have and keeps debating whether to build.

The contrast with how Washington and Beijing each treat DJI stays the sharpest part of this story. The U.S. is trying to push DJI out of the market over security concerns it has not specified in court. China is keeping DJI’s drones flying commercially while making its own citizens register every flight with the state and detaining the people who unlock them. Same hardware, mirror-image anxieties, opposite tools.

Whether scan-and-fly stays confined to pilot zones or expands nationwide is the signal worth watching. Yu said he hopes it extends across the country, but a training-center founder’s hope is not a policy timeline, and Beijing’s own example shows the central government is equally willing to lock a city down to zero. The revised Civil Aviation Law takes effect July 1, 2026. How that statute treats designated low-altitude zones will tell us whether scan-and-fly becomes the national default or stays a Shanghai-and-Sichuan experiment. That is the document to read when it lands, not the press release that announced the app.

Sources: South China Morning Post, Xinhua, Civil Aviation Administration of China 2025 statistical bulletin.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.