China News MCP Server

@pipeworx/china-news

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.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1863+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

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).

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "china-news": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/china-news/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/china-news/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1863+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/china_news_search \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"query":"Taiwan","limit":5}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/china_news_search. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Run it from npm

@pipeworx/mcp-china-news is a local stdio bridge to the Pipeworx gateway: your MCP client starts it with npx, and it forwards every call to the same https://gateway.pipeworx.io/china-news/mcp endpoint shown above. It needs network access; there is no offline mode.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "china-news": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-china-news"]
    }
  }
}

Without a key it calls anonymously, capped at 50 calls a day. A free account raises that to 200 a day: get a key at https://pipeworx.io/signup and add "env": { "PIPEWORX_API_KEY": "<your key>" } to the server entry. The key is sent as a Bearer token, the same way a hosted connection sends it, so calls are metered and billed exactly as they are there.

It lists only this pack's tools by default. Set PIPEWORX_META_TOOLS=1 to also list ask_pipeworx and the other gateway-wide tools.

Behind an HTTPS proxy: Node's built-in fetch does not read HTTPS_PROXY by default. Newer Node releases honour it when NODE_USE_ENV_PROXY=1 is set; check your Node version's documentation.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about China News data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT