A Chinese IP comes from a Chinese internet provider, most often China Telecom, China Mobile or China Unicom. A residential proxy routes your traffic through one of their customer lines. Chinese sites then show you yuan prices, local search results and the ads that run there.
China's address space is huge: 342.9 million IPv4 addresses across 3,251 holders. China Telecom's CHINANET records fill seven of the fourteen largest places. The largest pool a seller advertises, 11.1 million, equals 3.2% of that space. And 192 of the 202 working free Chinese proxies on our list were flagged on October 26, 2026. Our residential proxies target China at $0.50/GB for one GB.
Which networks does a Chinese IP come from?
APNIC, the internet registry for the Asia Pacific region, lists every block it gives out, with the holder's country. Its file, with records to October 24, 2026, lists 342,940,928 IPv4 addresses for China, in 8,797 blocks held by 3,251 holders:
China Telecom registers much of its space by province. Next to its main CHINANET record, the fourteen largest include six provincial ones: Zhejiang, Guangdong, Jiangsu, Hunan, Shanghai and Sichuan. The seven hold 87,803,648 addresses. China Mobile's CMNET record and China Unicom's largest record follow. CERNET, the China Education and Research Network, appears with its Shanghai record, and Tencent Cloud holds 4.3 million. At the bottom, 2,893 holders with 16,384 addresses or fewer share only 1.5%.
Routing shows how the big three run that space. On October 26, 2026, 25 networks announced China Telecom's main record. The CHINANET backbone carried most of it, and provincial and 5G networks named for cities such as Zhuhai and Suzhou the rest. China Mobile's CMNET record runs on 13 networks, most of them provincial. Some large records sit idle. No network announced 8.4 million of North Star's 8.9 million addresses, or 6.3 million of China TieTong's 14.0 million.
Our China proxies page lists 40 networks for Residential Premium, among them China Telecom, Henan Mobile Communications and Hebei Mobile Communication. It also lists 63 cities across 26 regions, such as Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Guangzhou.
About half of Chinese users can reach IPv6. APNIC Labs measured 49.0% as IPv6-capable in the 30 days to October 23, 2026. A year earlier it was 49.6%, and in October 2020 21.0%.
How big are the Chinese pools sellers advertise?
Small against the registry, and far apart from each other. We read five sellers' China pages through our server on October 26, 2026:
Bright Data names 1,405,563 proxy IPs in its page title and 351,390 China IPs lower down, a quarter as many. We charted the title.
Shifter claims 11,122,145 Chinese IPs, while SOAX advertises 31,800. DataImpulse's counters showed 5,546 unique Chinese IPs in 24 hours, 54,621 in 30 days and only 105 active at once. Oxylabs puts its 9,250,182 on a page offering residential or datacenter proxies. We do not publish our own pool size per country.
What changes with a Chinese IP?
Sites see a visitor from China. Residential Lite sets the country at the lowest rate. Residential Premium can hold a line in one city or on one of the 40 networks, chosen by its AS number.
Each site keeps its own rules for proxy traffic. MaxMind, an IP data vendor, flags suspected residential proxies in its Anonymous IP database. Our guide to how websites detect proxies lists the other signals.
Why do free Chinese proxies fail?
There are plenty, and nearly all carry flags. Our tracker has logged 26,982 Chinese addresses from public free proxy lists since May 13, 2026, and 7,226 worked at least once. On October 26, 202 were working.
46 of those ran on datacenter networks, 33 of them at Alibaba. The largest groups sat on China Unicom Beijing's network (71) and on Abitcool's (41). An IP reputation check had flagged 192 of the 202 and reported 191 for recent abuse. Our free proxy list for China shows the live ones, which suit a quick test.
How do you pay from mainland China?
By card. On September 24, 2021, the People's Bank of China and nine other national bodies issued a notice on crypto trading. In the summary of the law firm Davis Polk, it "declares cryptocurrency-related business activities in mainland China as illegal". Baker McKenzie notes an earlier joint notice from 2013, which said Bitcoin "should not be used as currency in the market".
So from mainland China, use a Visa or Mastercard card that pays abroad, from $10. The money goes into one balance that never expires, and our payment options page lists every method.
How much traffic does a Chinese job use?
Roughly 380 full desktop pages fit in a GB. HTTP Archive's 2024 Page Weight chapter found a median of 2,652 KB per desktop page and 2,311 KB per mobile page. Fetches without images weigh far less, so weigh twenty pages of your own target before you buy.
Which plan fits a Chinese job?
Residential Lite with China as the country covers most work, at $0.50/GB for one GB and $0.44 per GB at volume. With 192 of 202 free proxies flagged, the free list is for tests only. Residential Premium adds the 63 cities, the 40 networks and sticky sessions of up to 24 hours. It costs $1.49/GB for one GB and $1.00 per GB at volume. Every tier is on our residential proxies page.
What this page could not check
- We tested no speed, success rate or block rate on any network, ours included.
- We do not publish which Chinese networks our exits use, or how many there are.
- APNIC's file counts addresses handed out, which is neither the addresses in use nor a count of users.
- The operators hold many records under provincial names, so the fourteen largest show only part of each.
- The payment rule comes from law firms' summaries. We did not read the 2021 notice itself.
- Seller pool numbers are what each page showed on October 26, 2026, and we could not check what each one counts.
- We will check every number on this page again by January 26, 2027.
Sources
- APNIC, delegated-apnic-extended-latest, serial 20261026 with records to October 24, 2026, read October 26, 2026.
- APNIC, RDAP records for the largest Chinese address blocks, read October 26, 2026.
- RIPEstat, prefix overview for every block of the fourteen largest Chinese records, read October 26, 2026.
- APNIC Labs, IPv6 use per economy, China, data to October 23, 2026.
- Davis Polk, "China further tightens controls over crypto transactions", October 4, 2021.
- Baker McKenzie, "China's central bank declares all cryptocurrency transactions illegal", October 4, 2021.
- HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2024, Page Weight chapter, December 30, 2024.
- MaxMind, GeoIP Anonymous IP database documentation, read October 25, 2026.
- Shifter, Oxylabs, Bright Data, SOAX and DataImpulse, China location pages, as shown on October 26, 2026.
- HProxy, residential pricing and payment options pages, read October 25, 2026, and China page, read October 26, 2026.
- HProxy, free proxy check for China, October 26, 2026.
