Hmm...launch success has apparently been officially confirmed, T-0 was indeed 17:51 UTC...but the "thingy" has a new name - Shiyan 9!
More on that later after I catch some sleep...it's 2:30 am here. 
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Some photos of the LM-7A taking flight at around 17:51 UTC, from people watching there:pic.twitter.com/m3v1gAnz4G
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Official reports now gives the capabilities of the LM-7A as 7.0+ t to GTO, 5.0+ t to LTO & 5.5+ t to 200 x 5000 km x 0 deg. inc. equatorial orbit. 3-5 launches are currently planned yearly through to 2025.
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It was also confirmed that the boosters & 1st stage separates in one piece (a la GSLV). This has long been suspected as it was mentioned in papers as a drop zone mitigation to bring the LM-7A to Xichang, but it looks this has been adopted for all LM-7A rockets.
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As for Shiyan 9 = XJY-6-02, "spatial environment monitoring" is mentioned as the main new tech validation objective (looking at other sats?
). CAST reports the satellite assembly took just 8 months so there must be flight spares all around the place. 
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It's interesting to see zero-inclination orbit launches (the 5000 km reference orbit sounds really like
@SES_Satellites' O3b) & planetary exploration missions to Moon/Mars/asteroids explicitly mentioned as the LM-7A's missions. Maybe these will be 1st to move from the LM-3B?pic.twitter.com/U93kquOFeo
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The thing in front is likely to be > 6 tonnes. How such shaped big geostationary satellites can do "spatial environment monitoring" w/ reference to hints noted before is...beyond my expertise.
pic.twitter.com/ZUpRJn3FQx
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Exact T-0 was 17:51:28.409 UTC; window was 17:51:21 - 18:10:54 UTC.pic.twitter.com/sW2HrOMyOQ
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is this the one where the core stage makes it into orbit? If so that would be a cool wetlab if it had a docking mechanism
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That's the LM-5B (LM-5 w/o 2nd stage) - this will be heavily used in these 2 years to lift the 3 modules of the Chinese Space Station.
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