@pipeworx/china-news

Connect: https://gateway.pipeworx.io/china-news/mcp · Install: one-click buttons

Tools: 3

Search recent news coverage from 28 Chinese, Hong Kong, Taiwanese and overseas-Chinese publishers — headline, publisher, URL, publication time, theme tags and average article tone — sourced from the GDELT Project’s Global Knowledge Graph.

Tools

• china_news_search({query?, region?, outlets?, lang?, since?, until?, limit?}) — how a topic is being covered across mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwanese and diaspora outlets. Free text is matched against the headline, the article URL and GDELT’s theme tags.
• china_news_article({url}) — everything known about one indexed article: publisher, headline, time, themes, tone, mentioned places. Says in words that no article text is available rather than returning an empty body.
• china_news_outlets({region?, method?, searchable_only?}) — the audited census of 106 publishers, each flagged searchable: true|false, with the timestamp of its most recent indexed article. This is the tool that makes coverage checkable instead of assumed.

Auth

Keyless. No caller credential of any kind.

Data sources

• http://data.gdeltproject.org/gdeltv2/ — the GDELT Global Knowledge Graph bulk feed, published every 15 minutes, filtered to the China/HK/TW publisher set. GDELT’s terms permit commercial reuse.
• docs/data/china-news-inventory.json in the Pipeworx monorepo — the hand-audited publisher census behind china_news_outlets (fleet #1390).

Things the next person would otherwise rediscover

• GDELT has no article text, for any publisher, ever. The Global Knowledge Graph is an index of articles, not a copy of them. china_news_article returns body_available: false with a named reason; do not add a body field that is sometimes an empty string.
• region is not lang. The census region is the publisher’s jurisdiction. A Chinese-language query answered with Taiwanese coverage is the single most common mistake in this domain — docs/china-news-plan.md sec 9 records it being made with GDELT’s own sourcelang: parameter.
• lang is read from the SERVING HOST, not from the publisher’s home edition. Measured 2026-09-11: every host then present in the index was an English one, and four of them (english.news.cn, en.people.cn, en.gmw.cn, en.ce.cn) belong to publishers the census records as zh — GDELT indexes the mainland state outlets’ English editions far more heavily than their Chinese ones. Filtering on the publisher’s language would have answered lang: "zh" with English articles.
• Coverage is genuinely sparse, and that is not a bug. Per 15-minute file, 0-20 rows match the publisher set, and consecutive files often match none of them — many of these outlets publish a handful of times a day. An empty search result is therefore normal; china_news_search answers one by naming the filters it applied and listing the publishers that do currently have articles, so it can be told apart from a broken tool.
• Headlines arrive HTML-entity-encoded, and that cuts both ways. GDELT’s PAGE_TITLE renders every non-ASCII character as a numeric character reference, so a Chinese headline is stored as 葉門叛軍…. Two consequences, both handled here: titles are decoded on read (so the current 30-day window is fixed, not just future rows), and a free-text query containing non-ASCII characters is searched in BOTH spellings — a literal CJK query matches nothing against the stored text, however many rows are there.
• Publisher domains arrive as subdomains. GDELT records the serving host (english.news.cn), never the census home domain (news.cn). Every domain filter here matches exact-or-dot-suffix — never substring, or theepochtimes.com would match epochtimes.com, a different publisher.
• Some headlines are genuinely absent. China Daily’s GKG rows carry a site-wide tagline instead of the article headline, so it is stored as absent; a row can have title: null and a title_unavailable note. That is why the free-text search also matches the URL slug and the theme tags — a headline-only search could never reach those rows.
• The DOC API is not an alternative backend. api.gdeltproject.org never cleared 50% success across three measurement sessions at any request spacing (docs/china-news-plan.md sec 8a).

Tools

• china_news_search — Search recent news coverage from Chinese, Hong Kong, Taiwanese and overseas-Chinese publishers — Xinhua, China Daily, Global Times, People’s Daily, South China Morning Post, CNA Taiwan, CGTN, Caixin a
• china_news_article — Look up one indexed China/Hong Kong/Taiwan news article by its URL and return everything known about it: publisher, headline, publication time, GDELT theme tags, average article tone and the places it
• china_news_outlets — List the Chinese, Hong Kong, Taiwanese and overseas-Chinese news publishers Pipeworx has audited — 106 of them — with each one’s jurisdiction, publishing language, how its content is reachable, whethe