China proxies
Searches for a China proxy come from three groups of people who want opposite things, and most pages on this subject answer the wrong one. Before anything else: we sell datacenter IPv4 addresses located in China, and residential targeting accepts CN. We do not sell ISP or mobile addresses there, and we are not a tool for reaching the outside internet from inside the country. If that last one is what you need, this page will not help and no amount of reading further will change that.
What we have in China
Two of our four types cover China. ISP and mobile addresses do not exist in our Chinese inventory at all, and we would rather say so here than after you have paid.
What Chinese addresses get used for
Marketplace pricing and stock
Taobao, Tmall, JD.com, Pinduoduo, 1688: listings, promotions and delivery options differ for visitors who look Chinese.
Local search results
Baidu results vary by location and language settings, and checking them from outside returns a version nobody in China sees.
Ad and campaign verification
Weibo, Toutiao and publisher placements: a creative bought for a Chinese audience only renders for one.
App and content catalogues
Regional app stores and media catalogues list different titles, so capture has to happen from inside.
What looks different from outside China
These serve a Chinese visitor something other than what a foreign one sees. This page is about appearing local for commercial research; it is not about reaching the wider internet from inside the country, which is not something we sell.
Which type to take for a Chinese job
Chinese IPv4 from our supplier catalogue, dedicated for the term, traffic unmetered.
Volume collection where the target does not filter hosting ranges
CN targeting through the gateway, billed per gigabyte. Availability follows the devices online.
Marketplace pricing, Baidu results, ad verification
Cities people ask for here
Cities are set with the _city_ suffix. Availability moves more than in Europe, so treat a city as a preference and write a country-level fallback.
The setups people take here most often
- 01Chinese datacenter firstStart here: unmetered traffic, and it works whenever the target does not check address class.
- 02Residential with _c_CNFor marketplaces and Baidu, where a hosting range gets filtered.
- 03Timeouts at 45 secondsCross-border routes are slower and lossier. Retry with backoff rather than at full speed.
- 04Hong Kong or Singapore as a fallbackOften the right answer when you need routing rather than Chinese content.
Three different questions, one search phrase
Work out which of these you are asking before comparing any provider, including us. They need completely different tools and only one of them is a proxy purchase.
- You want to look like a visitor inside China. Market research, price checks on Chinese marketplaces, verifying that a campaign renders for Chinese users, testing how your own product behaves for that audience. This is what a Chinese address is for, and it is what we sell.
- You are outside China and want to read Chinese sites. Most of the time you do not need a Chinese address at all. Chinese sites are reachable from abroad; what you hit is rate limiting and bot defence, and the answer to that is more addresses and slower pacing rather than Chinese ones.
- You are inside China and want to reach the wider internet. That is a different category of tool with its own legal considerations in that jurisdiction, and it is not what we sell. We are not going to pretend otherwise to make a sale.
What is genuinely available, and what is not
Chinese inventory is thinner than European inventory, and pretending otherwise wastes your time.
Datacenter IPv4 in China is real and behaves like datacenter capacity anywhere: dedicated for the term, unmetered traffic, from $1.15 per address per month on the volume tier. It carries the same weakness it carries everywhere, namely that the address traces back to a hosting company, and Chinese platforms filter hosting ranges as readily as Western ones.
Residential targeting accepts CN, and the gateway will route you through a Chinese exit when one is online. Be more careful with expectations here than you would be with Germany: the pool is smaller and less stable, and a location that answered this morning can be empty this afternoon. Build the fallback before you build the pipeline.
ISP addresses and mobile modems in China we simply do not have. There is no roadmap promise attached to that sentence. If your work depends on a Chinese carrier address, we are the wrong provider today.
What needs a Chinese address and what only looks like it does
The distinction saves real money, because Chinese residential traffic is the most expensive way to answer a question that a datacenter address in Singapore often answers for free.
- Marketplace pricing and availability. Listings, promotions and delivery options differ for visitors who look Chinese, so this genuinely needs a Chinese exit.
- Ad verification for campaigns targeted at China. The creative only renders for the audience it was bought for, which is the entire point of the check.
- App store and content checks. Regional catalogues differ, and what a Chinese user sees is what you need to capture.
- Public data that does not vary by visitor. Company registries, documentation, prices published identically worldwide. A Chinese address adds cost and latency here and buys nothing.
- Search results from Baidu and similar. These vary by location, but often by city and language settings more than by country, so test before assuming the address alone will do it.
Connection strings for China
The country code is CN, upper case, in the same position as any other country. Datacenter addresses in China are static and take no suffixes: the host is the IP from your dashboard.
Set your timeouts higher than you would for Europe. Cross-border routes to and from China are slower and lossier than anything inside the EU, and a client configured with a ten second timeout will report failures that a thirty second timeout would have completed.
Chinese exits and the timeouts they need
curl --max-time 45 -x login_c_CN:[email protected]:10000 https://api.ipify.org
# a Chinese datacenter address: static, no suffixes
curl --max-time 45 -x login:password@YOUR-CN-IP:50100 https://api.ipify.org
# resolve on our side so the lookup is Chinese too
curl --max-time 45 -x socks5h://login_c_CN:[email protected]:10000 https://api.ipify.org
# a fallback worth writing: CN first, Singapore second
# a 400 or 502 on CN means the pool is empty right now, not that the country is goneRouting reality, stated without marketing
Traffic crossing the Chinese border is filtered and shaped at the network level, and that affects connections in both directions regardless of who sells you the address. This is not a property of our network and no provider controls it.
What that means in practice: higher and more variable latency than you are used to, occasional packet loss on cross-border hops, and routes that behave differently at different times of day. Requests that work at 3am may time out at peak hours.
Design for it rather than tuning around it. Generous timeouts, retries with backoff, a fallback location, and monitoring that distinguishes a slow response from a failed one. Teams that treat Chinese routes like European ones spend weeks blaming the proxy for something upstream of it.
Choosing the type for a Chinese target
Shorter than the equivalent list for Europe, because there are only two options.
- Start with the Chinese datacenter address. If the target serves you normally, you are done, and the traffic is unmetered.
- A 403 on the first request means hosting ranges are filtered. Move that domain to residential with _c_CN.
- If residential CN is unavailable when you need it, decide in advance what happens next: fall back to a neighbouring market, queue the job, or fail loudly. Silent fallback to a non-Chinese exit is how datasets get quietly wrong.
- For anything that needs a stable identity in China over months, we currently have no good answer, and neither do most providers. Say so internally before promising it to a stakeholder.
Mistakes specific to China
These come up repeatedly and none of them are about the proxy itself.
- English headers from a Chinese address. Send zh-CN in Accept-Language, or you capture the internationalised version of a page rather than the domestic one.
- Forgetting the timezone. The whole country runs on UTC+8 with no daylight saving. A profile on a Chinese address reporting a European timezone contradicts itself.
- Treating Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China as one market. They have different catalogues, different platforms and different routing. We list Hong Kong and Taiwan separately in our coverage for exactly this reason.
- Assuming a desktop view is the whole story. Chinese platforms are mobile-first to a degree Western ones are not, and the desktop page is frequently the secondary experience.
- Retrying a timeout at full speed. On cross-border routes an aggressive retry loop turns a slow minute into a blocked hour.
What a month of Chinese work costs
Two realistic scenarios, at our prices, so you can sanity-check any quote you receive.
- Price monitoring across Chinese marketplaces, 20,000 product pages a day, images blocked, roughly 100 KB per page. That is 2 GB a day and about 60 GB a month: $60 on residential at $1.00 per GB. If the marketplace tolerates hosting ranges, five Chinese datacenter addresses cost $7.50 a month with unmetered traffic.
- Ad verification for a China campaign, 150 placements a day at about 500 KB each. Roughly 2.25 GB a month, so a little over two dollars of traffic. As in every country, the proxy is the cheap part of ad verification.
The legal part, stated plainly
China has its own data protection and cross-border data transfer rules, and collecting personal data about people in China creates obligations under them regardless of where your company sits. Routing through a Chinese address does not make you established there, and it does not exempt you from anything.
This is general information rather than legal advice. Our terms require lawful use and we act on abuse reports. For anything where the answer carries commercial risk, ask a lawyer familiar with that jurisdiction.
Verifying a Chinese exit before you trust it
Do this every time you start a Chinese job, not once when you buy. Availability moves, and a silent fallback to the wrong country is the failure mode that costs the most here.
Three checks, plus the one that matters most in China
# 1. is the exit actually in China
curl --max-time 45 -x login_c_CN:[email protected]:10000 https://ipinfo.io/json
# 2. does the sticky session hold
for i in 1 2 3; do
curl -s --max-time 45 -x login_c_CN_s_42_ttl_15m:[email protected]:10000 https://api.ipify.org; echo
done
# 3. assert the country in code before writing any row
# if the answer is not CN, stop the job rather than storing the dataWhat Chinese platforms check beyond the address
A Chinese exit gets you past the first gate and nothing more. The platforms that matter commercially here are as sophisticated as anything in the West, and several signals carry more weight than geography.
Language and locale come first. A browser announcing en-US from a Shanghai address is not a Chinese visitor, and the contradiction is free to detect. Set Accept-Language to zh-CN, set the profile locale to match, and set the timezone to Asia/Shanghai.
Device shape comes second. These platforms are mobile-first in a way Western ones are not, and a desktop fingerprint asking for a page that ninety percent of real users open on a phone is unusual before anything else is considered.
Then behaviour. Request pacing that never varies, sessions that never scroll, and catalogue crawls that walk pages in perfect numeric order are all cheaper to spot than the address is.
None of this is an argument against a Chinese address. It is an argument against expecting the address alone to do the work, which is the single most common reason a China project fails after the proxy is bought.
Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore as alternatives
Before committing to Chinese inventory, check whether a neighbouring market answers your question. All three are in our catalogue with better availability and easier routing, and for a surprising share of tasks they are the right answer.
- Hong Kong. Datacenter and ISP addresses both available. Routes to mainland targets are usually better than from Europe, and for reading Chinese sites rather than appearing Chinese this is frequently the practical choice.
- Taiwan. ISP addresses available. A separate market with its own platforms and catalogues, so useful in its own right rather than as a stand-in for the mainland.
- Singapore. Datacenter and ISP addresses available, excellent routing across Asia, and the usual default for teams running Asian scraping infrastructure that does not need to look local.
- The rule of thumb: if the content differs for Chinese visitors, you need China. If it does not and you are only fighting latency or rate limits, one of these three is faster, cheaper and steadier.
Setting it up in the tools people actually use
Same login string in three shapes, with the settings China specifically requires: Chinese locale, Shanghai timezone and timeouts that account for the border.
China in an antidetect browser, in Python and in Playwright
# Antidetect profile
Type: HTTP or SOCKS5
Host: proxy.sotaproxy.com
Port: 10000
Login: YOUR_LOGIN_c_CN_s_1001_ttl_1h
Password: YOUR_PASSWORD
Timezone: Asia/Shanghai Language: zh-CN
# Python: note the timeout and the language header
import requests
url = "http://YOUR_LOGIN_c_CN_s_7_ttl_15m:[email protected]:10000"
r = requests.get("https://example.cn", proxies={"http": url, "https": url},
headers={"Accept-Language": "zh-CN,zh;q=0.9", "Accept-Encoding": "gzip"},
timeout=45)
# Playwright: locale and timezone have to agree with the exit
ctx = browser.new_context(
proxy={"server": "http://proxy.sotaproxy.com:10000",
"username": "YOUR_LOGIN_c_CN_s_3_ttl_1h",
"password": "YOUR_PASSWORD"},
locale="zh-CN", timezone_id="Asia/Shanghai")Questions people ask about Chinese addresses
Do you have residential proxies in China?
CN targeting is accepted by the gateway and works when Chinese exits are online. The pool is smaller and less stable than in Europe, so write the fallback path before you depend on it.
Do you have ISP or mobile proxies in China?
No. They are not in our supplier catalogue for China, and we are not going to sell you something adjacent and call it that.
Can I use this to access blocked sites from inside China?
No. That is a different category of tool with its own legal considerations in that jurisdiction, and it is not what we sell.
Why are my requests to Chinese sites so slow?
Cross-border routes are filtered and shaped at the network level, which adds latency and loss that no provider controls. Raise your timeouts to about 45 seconds, retry with backoff, and expect different behaviour at different times of day.
Do I need a Chinese address to read Chinese websites?
Often not. Chinese sites are reachable from abroad, and what usually blocks you is rate limiting rather than geography. Try a cheaper location first and move only if the content actually differs.
Is Hong Kong the same as mainland China?
No, and treating them as one market is a common and expensive mistake. We list Hong Kong separately in our coverage because it routes and behaves differently.