How to get Chinese-language news data via API (2026 guide)

Chinese-language news is one of the hardest slices of the global information space to collect: sources are fragmented across the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and a huge diaspora, much of the interesting signal lives on Telegram rather than the open web, and almost none of it appears in English-first news APIs. Here is how to get it as structured JSON.

Why Chinese-language coverage is different

Most news APIs treat "China news" as English-language wire stories about China. That misses the actual Chinese-language information space: mainland outlets (Xinhua, The Paper, regional portals), Hong Kong and Taiwan media with very different editorial positions, Singapore and Malaysia's Chinese press, and a fast-moving layer of Chinese-language Telegram channels serving communities across Southeast Asia and the diaspora.

These segments disagree with each other constantly — which is exactly what makes them valuable. State media, independent HK/TW outlets and diaspora channels covering the same event give you narrative divergence you can measure, not just a single "China said" headline.

What the feed contains

NewsAgent Data indexes Chinese-language sources across several countries — language=zh spans mainland outlets, Hong Kong (country=hk), Taiwan (country=tw), Singapore (country=sg) and hundreds of Chinese-language Telegram channels covering Southeast Asia. Every item arrives in the same 19-field schema as the rest of the feed: urgency score 0–10, political lean, topic tags, country tags and the original timestamp.

curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" \
  "https://api.newsagentdata.com/v1/feed?lang=zh&min_score=5&days=7"

Or slice by geography instead of language — everything published in Taiwan regardless of language:

curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" \
  "https://api.newsagentdata.com/v1/feed?country=tw&days=3"

The Telegram layer

Chinese-language Telegram is a distinct ecosystem: community news channels for Chinese speakers in Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, the Philippines and Dubai, incident-reporting channels, and outlets that publish there precisely because it sits outside both Western platforms and mainland moderation. Collecting it yourself means MTProto clients, channel discovery and constant churn management. In our feed it is just another source type — pre-collected, deduplicated and scored, marked with source metadata.

Use cases we see

Supply-chain and market monitoring: factory incidents, port disruptions and regulatory moves often surface in regional Chinese-language media hours before English coverage. OSINT and risk teams: narrative tracking across state, independent and diaspora sources. Research: a citable, structured corpus of Chinese-language coverage filtered by topic and date.

Try it without a key

The public sample endpoint returns live Chinese-language items with no signup:

curl "https://api.newsagentdata.com/public/sample?country=cn&limit=6"

Or point-and-click the same query in the API playground.