8 Best China Proxies (2026)

China is one of the hardest proxy locations to buy well. Taobao, Tmall, JD.com and Pinduoduo show different prices, coupons and delivery times to mainland shoppers; Baidu, not Google, decides what Chinese customers find; and apps such as Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili and WeChat behave differently, or not at all, for overseas users. If you monitor Chinese prices, track Baidu rankings, verify ads, test a Chinese app or research Chinese consumer content, you need an IP address that Chinese websites accept as local.

The trouble is that "China" on a proxy provider's location page often means far less than it seems. Mainland residential supply is thin compared with Europe or the US, some pools are counted over a whole month while only a few hundred IPs are online at a time, and many "China" IPs turn out to be Hong Kong or cloud addresses. We checked what 16 providers actually publish for mainland China — the size of their Chinese pool, province, city and carrier targeting, which proxy types they sell there, and what it costs — and picked the 8 that we think are credible. That's fewer than in our other country guides, on purpose.

Quick picks

• Best for China-specific targeting: ProxyEmpire — 30 provinces and regions, 191 cities and districts, and all three Chinese carriers on mobile.
• Best for enterprise: Bright Data — residential, mobile, ISP and datacenter IPs in China, with city, ZIP, carrier and ASN targeting.
• Largest claimed Chinese pool: Oxylabs — 9,250,182 Chinese IPs on its China page.
• Best all-rounder for Asia projects: Decodo — Chinese residential, mobile, ISP and datacenter IPs with a free trial and clear refund terms.
• Best for irregular usage: IPRoyal — 2.5M+ claimed Chinese IPs, several hundred Chinese cities and residential traffic that never expires.
• Best budget option: Webshare — 771,490 claimed Chinese IPs and residential traffic from $1.40/GB at volume.

Comparison table

Chinese IP counts are each provider's own claim from its China page in October 2026. Providers count differently — unique IPs seen over 30 days, IPs online at one moment, or all proxy types combined — and for China the gap between those numbers is unusually large (see DataImpulse under other providers). Prices change often; check the provider's pricing page before you buy.

The Chinese proxy landscape

Knowing how Chinese internet access works makes it much easier to judge whether a "China proxy" is what it claims to be.

Three carriers dominate. Almost every Chinese home and mobile connection runs through one of three state-owned groups: China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom. APNIC's user estimates put China Telecom's main network (AS4134, "CHINANET") at about a quarter of Chinese internet users, with China Mobile (AS9808) and China Unicom (AS4837, "China169") at around 15–16% each, and the rest spread across provincial networks of the same three groups. A small number of cable operators, such as Huashu (Wasu) in Hangzhou and Topway in Shenzhen, and the education network CERNET make up most of the remainder. A believable mainland residential IP will almost always belong to one of these.

The market is huge, but proxy supply is thin. China had more than 1.1 billion internet users according to CNNIC, the national network information centre. Very little of that reaches Western proxy networks. Residential proxy pools are built from apps and devices whose owners agree to share bandwidth, and the app stores, SDK ecosystems and payment rails those programmes rely on work differently in China. The result is that mainland pools are small relative to the country's size, and the providers that do publish real-time figures show it clearly: DataImpulse, for example, listed 55,653 unique Chinese residential IPs over 30 days but only 229 active at the moment we checked.

Some of the largest "China" networks were the wrong kind. In January 2026 Google's Threat Intelligence Group disrupted the IPIDEA proxy network, which it described as one of the largest residential proxy networks in the world, built largely from consumer devices enrolled through SDKs and apps that didn't clearly tell users. Google said it observed more than 550 threat groups using IPIDEA exit nodes in a single week, and that IPIDEA operated at least 13 proxy brands. Several of those brands were popular precisely because they advertised large Chinese pools. We have left all of them out — see other providers.

Hong Kong is not mainland China. Hong Kong has its own operators (HKT, HGC, China Mobile Hong Kong and others), its own regulator and no Great Firewall. To Taobao, Baidu or iQIYI, a Hong Kong IP is usually a foreign or regional visitor. Watch for mainland carriers' international arms too: China Mobile International (AS58453) and China Telecom's global networks announce many addresses from Hong Kong, so a "China Mobile" IP is not necessarily mainland.

The Great Firewall slows everything down. Traffic between a mainland IP and a server abroad crosses a limited number of international gateways where it is inspected and filtered. Latency of several hundred milliseconds is common, and congestion during the Chinese evening (roughly 8 pm to midnight, China Standard Time) adds packet loss and timeouts. That affects every provider equally, so plan for it rather than blaming one vendor.

Chinese sites have their own anti-bot systems. Alibaba, JD.com, Pinduoduo, Baidu and ByteDance run their own risk-control systems rather than the Western bot-protection services common in Europe and the US. They look at device fingerprints, login state, behaviour and IP reputation, and many pages require a logged-in account tied to a Chinese phone number. A clean mainland IP is necessary for these sites, but it's rarely sufficient.

1. ProxyEmpire — Best for China-specific targeting

ProxyEmpire, operated from Bulgaria, publishes the most detailed mainland China page of any provider we checked. It lists 30 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions and 191 cities and districts you can target, from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen to inland cities such as Lanzhou, Xining, Yinchuan and Guiyang, and it names the networks behind the IPs: home broadband on China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile (including China Unicom's Guangzhou and Shenzhen networks and China Telecom's Guangdong network), plus the regional cable operators Huashu in Hangzhou and Topway in Shenzhen.

For mobile, ProxyEmpire offers rotating 4G/5G IPs with carrier targeting on China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom. It is also unusually candid about what it doesn't sell: there are no static residential (ISP) proxies in mainland China, and the page points you to sticky sessions or to static IPs in Hong Kong, Japan or South Korea instead. It doesn't publish a total count of Chinese IPs.

Rotating residential costs $3.50/GB pay-as-you-go, and monthly plans fall from $2.85/GB to $1.50/GB at 1 TB, with unused traffic rolling over. Rotating mobile starts from $2/GB at volume and rotating datacenter from $0.35/GB. A $1.97 trial gives you 150 MB to test Chinese residential and mobile IPs, which is the cheapest way on this list to check that the provinces and carriers you need are actually online. The terms of service say all sales are final.

Visit ProxyEmpire ↗

2. Bright Data — Best for enterprise

Bright Data (founded in 2014 as Luminati Networks) is the only provider on this list that sells all four proxy types with mainland Chinese IPs — residential, mobile, ISP and datacenter — and offers its full targeting set there: city, state, ZIP, carrier and ASN. ASN targeting is especially useful in China, because it lets you choose between China Telecom (AS4134), China Unicom (AS4837) and China Mobile (AS9808) directly.

Its China figures are inconsistent, though. The China location page's title claimed 1,405,563 proxy IPs in October 2026, while the body of the same page showed 204,930 Chinese IPs. The difference is probably between IPs seen over a period and IPs available at that moment, but Bright Data doesn't explain it. Treat the lower figure as the safer guide to what you can use at once.

Prices are the highest on this list. Residential pay-as-you-go has a list price of $8/GB, with coupons often lowering it, falling to a list $5/GB on the $1,999/month plan. ISP proxies start at $1.30 per IP and datacenter IPs at $0.90; mobile proxies have no public price. Residential access requires KYC, and Bright Data holds ISO 27001, SOC 2, SOC 3 and CSA STAR certifications — the paperwork a compliance team will ask for before approving a vendor that routes traffic through China.

Visit Bright Data ↗

3. Oxylabs — Best for large-scale scraping

Oxylabs, a Lithuanian provider and one of the largest in the market, claims the biggest Chinese presence of anyone we checked: 9,250,182 Chinese IPs on its China page. It doesn't break that figure down by proxy type, city or carrier, and the page only describes residential and datacenter proxies for China, so treat the headline as a measure of reach over time rather than of what's online at once.

Oxylabs' strengths for China are the ones that matter for heavy, steady collection: a global residential pool of 175M+ IPs with sticky sessions and city-level targeting, mature tooling, and account management with SLAs. If you plan to collect millions of Taobao, JD.com or Baidu pages a month and need someone to call when success rates drop, it's a safe choice. For a few gigabytes of testing, cheaper providers below will do.

Residential plans start at $30 a month on the Starter plan ($6/GB), falling to $5/GB, $4/GB and $2.50/GB on larger monthly commitments. There's no cheap pay-as-you-go entry.

Visit Oxylabs ↗

4. Decodo — Best all-rounder for Asia projects

Decodo, the Lithuanian provider formerly known as Smartproxy, lists China among its locations with all four proxy types: rotating residential, mobile, ISP and datacenter. It doesn't publish a Chinese IP count — its China page gives only its Asian total of 18.3M+ IPs — but residential traffic supports country, state, city and ASN targeting, so you can pin requests to a Chinese province or to one of the three carriers' networks.

That makes Decodo a good fit if China is one of several Asian markets you cover. The same account and the same targeting syntax work for China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, so you can compare what mainland and Hong Kong users see without juggling vendors. Mobile IPs come from what Decodo describes as real 3G, 4G and 5G operators, but it doesn't name the Chinese carriers.

Pay-as-you-go residential traffic costs $4/GB, monthly plans fall from $3.75/GB to $2.75/GB, and enterprise volume reaches $2/GB at 1 TB. Mobile starts from $2.25/GB on larger plans and dedicated ISP IPs from $2.50 per IP. New users get a 3-day trial with 100 MB, and first purchases come with a 14-day money-back guarantee if you haven't used the free trial or more than 20% of your traffic.

Visit Decodo ↗

5. IPRoyal — Best for irregular usage

IPRoyal claims 2,532,825 Chinese IPs and publishes one of the longest Chinese location lists we found: several hundred cities and towns, from Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Chengdu to small county towns in Heilongjiang, Xinjiang and Tibet. If you need to see what a shopper in a lower-tier city sees — a common question for Pinduoduo, whose growth came largely from smaller cities — that breadth is useful.

Its China page lists rotating residential, mobile, ISP and datacenter products. Rotating residential starts at $7.35 for 1 GB and falls to $1.75/GB at 10 TB, and residential traffic never expires, so you can buy a block and use it over months. Dedicated mobile proxies cost from $10.11 per day; ISP proxies start at $2.40 and datacenter at $1.39 per proxy (per month on 90-day terms). The page doesn't name Chinese carriers or give a separate Chinese mobile count, and IPRoyal's ISP location list doesn't obviously include mainland China, so confirm static Chinese IPs are in stock before ordering them.

Sticky residential sessions can last up to 7 days. Refunds are tight: within 24 hours and only if you've used 100 MB or less.

Visit IPRoyal ↗

6. Infatica — Best for governance-minded teams

Infatica, a Singapore-based provider, claims 670,301 Chinese residential IPs and lists 15 cities you can target: Chongqing, Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Tianjin, Wuhan, Suzhou, Linyi, Harbin, Shijiazhuang, Hangzhou, Zhengzhou and Xi'an. That covers China's largest metro areas, which is where most e-commerce and search research happens, but not much beyond them. Only residential proxies are offered for China, with rotating or sticky sessions.

Its main argument is governance. Infatica holds the widest ISO certification set we found among proxy providers (27001, 27701, 22301 and 20000-1) and requires KYC for all customers. Given the IPIDEA disruption and the questions it raised about how Chinese residential IPs are sourced, a provider that documents its controls is easier to justify to a security or legal team.

Residential pricing is $4/GB pay-as-you-go, $3.84/GB on the 25 GB monthly plan and down to $2.60/GB at 1 TB, or $2.08/GB billed yearly at the largest volumes. A $4 trial gives you 1 GB or 7 days.

Visit Infatica ↗

7. Webshare — Best budget option

Webshare, a California-based provider best known for cheap datacenter proxies, claims 771,490 online Chinese IPs on its China page and supports country, state, city, ZIP and ASN targeting on rotating residential traffic. Its China page also lists datacenter and ISP products, but the cheapest headline price — from $0.029 per IP — is for its general datacenter proxy list, so check the location of each IP before relying on it for China.

Rotating residential is where Webshare is good value: $3.50/GB on the 1 GB plan, falling to $1.40/GB at 3 TB. That's less than half the entry price of the enterprise providers above for country- or city-level Chinese traffic, which is often all you need for price monitoring on Taobao or JD.com. Webshare's China page FAQ quotes residential "from $7.00/month for 1 GB", which doesn't match its main pricing; we used the pricing page.

Webshare doesn't publish a Chinese city list or name Chinese carriers, and its company background is less documented than the enterprise providers'. Its help centre also has a guide for customers connecting from inside China — but as covered above, that's a different use case from this guide's, with legal questions of its own.

Visit Webshare ↗

8. Rayobyte — Best for consent-based sourcing

Rayobyte, a US company founded in 2015 (formerly Blazing SEO), sells Chinese residential IPs that it describes as coming from people in China who opted in, alongside static IPs you control. It doesn't publish a Chinese IP count or city list, but its Premium Residential product supports city targeting along with state, ZIP, ASN and device OS targeting globally, and Rayobyte is certified by the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative (EWDCI).

After the IPIDEA disruption, sourcing is a real buying criterion for China rather than a box-ticking exercise, and Rayobyte is one of the few providers that makes an explicit consent claim on its China page. Static Chinese IPs are sold through sales, from $0.85 per IP a month at scale with a commitment.

Premium Residential costs $3.50/GB for up to 49 GB, $2/GB from 50 GB, $1.50/GB from 250 GB and $0.70/GB from 1 TB, with enterprise rates from $0.50/GB through sales. Self-serve products come with a free trial, no card required.

Visit Rayobyte ↗

Other providers we considered

• SOAX — publishes a detailed China page with 27 provinces, about 50 cities and ISP targeting on China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile, but it claimed only 31,800 Chinese IPs, its Chinese ISP list includes Cloudflare WARP, and its China page notes that datacenter proxies are US-based. Its $1.99 trial (3 days, 400 MB) is a cheap way to check whether that's enough for you.
• DataImpulse — the most transparent figures we found, and the most sobering: 55,653 unique Chinese residential IPs over 30 days, 5,668 over 24 hours and 229 active in real time, and 133 active Chinese mobile IPs. At $1/GB it's cheap, but that pool is too thin for anything beyond light testing.
• Geonode — its China page claimed 27,596 residential IPs across 6 cities in one place and 84,210 or 500,000+ elsewhere on the same page, so we couldn't tell what's available.
• Novada — has a Hong Kong location page but no mainland China page that we could find in October 2026.
• NodeMaven — has a China page, but it publishes no Chinese IP counts, cities or carriers.
• IPIDEA-linked brands — in January 2026 Google disrupted the IPIDEA network and said it operated at least 13 proxy brands. Google and industry reporting named, among others, 360 Proxy, 922 Proxy, ABC Proxy, Cherry Proxy, IP2World, IPIDEA, Luna Proxy, PIA S5 Proxy, PY Proxy and Tab Proxy. We don't recommend any of them.
• NetNut — not recommended. On 2 July 2026 the FBI seized NetNut's domains in an action against the "Popa" botnet, carried out with Google and industry partners.

Which proxy type do you need for China?

Chinese use cases: practical tips

Taobao, Tmall, JD.com and Pinduoduo. Most product pages show more, or different, information to logged-in users, and logins require a Chinese phone number. Prices and promotions depend on the delivery address as well as the IP, so set a mainland city in the site's own location selector and use a matching city-level IP. Keep a sticky session for each browsing "visit", and spread requests over time: these platforms' risk-control systems are tuned to spot bursts.

Baidu rankings. Baidu personalises results by location, and its ads are geo-targeted by city and province. Use city-level residential IPs, set Accept-Language: zh-CN and expect CAPTCHAs if you rotate the IP on every query. For large keyword sets, a SERP API that supports Baidu may be cheaper than running your own browser through proxies.

Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili and Weibo. These are mobile-first platforms. Use mobile proxies on a Chinese carrier, a real or emulated Android or iOS device, and a Chinese locale and time zone. Expect much public content to require a logged-in account.

WeChat. WeChat works internationally, but accounts registered with a Chinese phone number and used mainly from China are treated differently from international accounts, and frequent changes of country trigger verification. If you need a consistent mainland IP for a WeChat account, use the same sticky residential or mobile IP each time rather than a rotating pool.

Streaming. iQIYI, Youku, Tencent Video and Mango TV restrict much of their catalogue to mainland China, and their terms usually prohibit circumventing geographic restrictions. Mainland residential pools are small and slow across the Great Firewall, and per-GB pricing makes video expensive. Don't buy China proxies primarily for streaming.

App store and ad verification. Chinese Android users mostly install apps from handset makers' and platforms' own stores (Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Tencent) rather than Google Play. If you need to verify how your app or ad appears, test from a mobile IP on the relevant carrier and province, and record what you see with timestamps.

How to test a China proxy

Before you scale up, spend a few minutes checking that the IPs you're given really are mainland Chinese and don't leak your own identity.

1. Check the ASN first. A mainland residential IP should belong to China Telecom (AS4134 or a provincial China Telecom network), China Unicom (AS4837 or a provincial network), China Mobile (AS9808 or a provincial network) or a recognisable regional cable operator. An ASN belonging to China Mobile International (AS58453), a Hong Kong operator, or a cloud or hosting company means you've been given a Hong Kong, international or datacenter exit, whatever the product page says.
2. Check geolocation in more than one database. Use two or three IP lookup services. They disagree more often for China than for most countries, especially for mobile IPs, which often geolocate to a provincial capital rather than the user's real city.
3. Match your browser to China. Set Accept-Language to zh-CN, the browser locale to Simplified Chinese and the time zone to Asia/Shanghai (China uses one time zone nationwide). A mainland IP with a US time zone and English-only settings is an obvious mismatch for risk-control systems.
4. Test reachability of Chinese and foreign sites. Load Baidu and Taobao through the proxy: both should respond normally. Then try a site that is blocked in mainland China, such as Google Search. If it loads quickly, the exit is probably not behind the Great Firewall — in other words, not a mainland IP.
5. Check for leaks. Test for WebRTC and DNS leaks, and make sure your own IPv6 address isn't bypassing the proxy.
6. Measure latency and loss from where your scraper runs. Run your scraper from an Asian cloud region (Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo or Seoul) rather than the US or Europe, raise timeouts and retries, and compare time-to-first-byte and failure rates during each provider's trial — ideally at both Chinese daytime and evening peak.
7. Test against your real targets. A proxy that passes an IP checker can still be challenged by Taobao or Baidu. Run a small batch against the pages you care about and measure the success rate before buying a large plan.

Is it legal to use a China proxy?

Using a proxy from outside China to view Chinese websites is legal in most countries. What you do through it, and where you are, is what matters:

• Inside China. Under a January 2017 notice from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), dedicated lines and other channels, including VPNs, may not be set up or rented for cross-border business without approval from the telecoms authorities. Using unapproved tools to get around the Great Firewall from inside China can breach Chinese rules. This guide doesn't cover that use case.
• Personal data. If you collect data about people in China — names, profiles, contact details, reviews linked to accounts — China's Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) applies, including to processing carried out abroad that targets people in China. The Data Security Law and Cybersecurity Law add rules on important data and on transferring data out of China, which the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) relaxed in part in March 2024 but did not remove.
• Terms of service and unauthorised access. Chinese platforms' terms generally prohibit automated access, and bypassing logins, CAPTCHAs or technical access controls can create legal risk in China and in your own country.
• Your own jurisdiction. Your home country's data protection, computer misuse and sanctions rules apply to what you collect and to who you pay, whatever the proxy's location.

Choose a provider that explains how it obtains consent from the people whose devices route traffic and that names its operating company — for China, after the IPIDEA disruption, this matters more than usual. This section is general information, not legal advice; take advice specific to your project if you plan large-scale collection of Chinese data.

Related guides

Getting good mainland Chinese IPs is mostly about checking that they really are mainland, residential or mobile, and well sourced — then picking the provider with the right targeting. If you work across East Asia, see our guides to Japan proxies and South Korea proxies. For broader comparisons by proxy type, read our guides to the best residential proxy providers, best mobile proxy providers and best ISP proxy providers. You can also browse every provider we track in the proxy provider directory, or start with the basics in what is a proxy?.