CHINA SURFACE INVESTIGATION — INFRASTRUCTURE AND REACHABILITY Measured 2026-09-05 10:21:48–10:21:55 UTC; report 2026-09-05. Finding: The handoff's access failures are not universal or permanent. This box currently retrieves usable Baidu results, the BWiki homepage and Genshin recentchanges API, and the MoeGirl homepage. Huiji and Sogou remain challenged. Gitee returns an explicit authentication error. A second region is a useful controlled experiment, not a demonstrated cure. METHOD AND RAW EVIDENCE Python urllib GET only; no cookies, authentication, CAPTCHA solving, browser automation, POST, or target edits. Four workers total, at most two related wiki endpoints in flight; 25-second timeout; 2MB maximum response. User-Agent identifies ChinaSurfaceResearch/1.0 as a read-only reachability check. Search query was 链接测试 (link test). Redirects followed normally. This is one observation per endpoint, not a reliability measurement. We did not independently verify the box's public egress address; location/provider follows the handoff. Reproducible script: investigation/china/infrastructure-raw/probe.py Machine-readable observations including exact URLs, times, SHA256 and final URLs: investigation/china/infrastructure-raw/probes.json Raw response bodies: infrastructure-raw/.body RESULTS Endpoint HTTP Bytes Seconds Interpretation baidu search 200 869257 3.416 Usable: nine result headings, relevant Chinese testing/tutorial results. cn.bing.com search 200 100219 0.366 Redirect to www.bing.com with mkt=zh-CN. Ten headings but ALL Google Maps/Earth/place pages, irrelevant to query. Transport success, semantic quality failure; not evidence of working mainland search. sogou search 200 5605 5.043 Redirect to /antispider/, body includes 验证码; challenge, no results. so.com search 302 151 6.850 urllib returned HTTPError after redirect handling, body is 302 Found. No results; precise cause unresolved. gitee.com/api/v5/gists 401 66 1.596 JSON: 登录失效，无权限访问该资源, code 40001 (login invalid/no access). Authentication limitation; no evidence a Chinese IP fixes it. www.huijiwiki.com 403 5557 0.318 Cloudflare Just a moment challenge. minecraft.huijiwiki API 403 5891 0.357 Same Cloudflare challenge, no MediaWiki JSON. wiki.biligame.com root 200 1393723 3.845 Actual WIKI homepage with links, redirected to /wiki/首页. BWiki /ys/api.php 200 987 0.746 VALID JSON with query.recentchanges array of five revisions and continuation token. zh.moegirl.org.cn root 200 616722 1.107 Actual homepage HTML. Does not prove API/history availability. Concrete usable API: https://wiki.biligame.com/ys/api.php?action=query&list=recentchanges&rclimit=5&format=json Returned five user-namespace wikiYSMap4Data.json page revisions dated 2026-09-05, apparently ordinary game/map data activity. These are reachability evidence only, not swarm candidates. Historical retention and anonymous-editor properties still need measuring. RECOMMENDED INFRASTRUCTURE EXPERIMENT Continue accessible targets here immediately. For a next paid vantage point, provision one Hong Kong Linux VPS, 2 cores/2GB RAM, SSH keys, fixed public egress, a 20GB local scrape cache, and one month without auto-renew. Keep the LLM orchestrator and corpus scans on existing infrastructure; send only bounded fetch jobs to the new box and bring response bodies/metadata home. The suggested size is an engineering estimate for lightweight HTTP fetching, not a vendor requirement. A browser workload would justify 4GB RAM after measuring memory. Run the exact same small probe set from each location, record status, body hashes, title, challenge/auth markers, and usable result counts. A second IP passing five requests does not establish sustained access. Repeat a low-rate sample at different times before moving a fleet. Honor explicit authentication and challenge boundaries; no CAPTCHA solving or undocumented access bypass. Return target-specific blocked states to bots rather than interpreting empty pages as negative findings. Maintain <=1 request/second per host initially, cache across workers, and back off on 429/503. REGION / PRODUCT COMPARISON 1. Hong Kong: best first geographic comparison, outside mainland hosting procedures, close enough to test Chinese routing. Official Tencent Lighthouse published Starter Linux price is USD 6/month for 2 cores, 2GB memory, 40GB SSD, 20Mbps, 512GB monthly transfer. Singapore same bundle is USD 4.20/month. Published overage is USD 0.12/GB HK and USD 0.081/GB Singapore. Thus a two-region one-month transport experiment starts at USD 10.20 list price before tax/add-ons/overage, subject to account inventory and checkout confirmation. Both remain datacenter IPs; no evidence either solves Huiji/Sogou anti-bot checks. [1] 2. Singapore: useful independent route and cheaper published starter bundle. Less direct evidence of benefit for mainland-restricted content than an actual mainland region. Alibaba warns that HK and Singapore Simple Application Server use international bandwidth and can have high mainland latency. Its International family is expressly labeled BGP (Non-China Optimized); don't buy solely on headline Mbps. [2][3] 3. Mainland (e.g. Shanghai or Shenzhen): strongest test of a mainland-only accessibility hypothesis, but has onboarding friction. Alibaba International requires identity verification for mainland resources; individual verification typically takes about three business days and mainland access includes a separate compliance review. HK does not require that mainland identity verification under the documented process. Account/payment security checks may still apply. No mainland VM price verified here; obtain an account-specific quote. [4] Do not confuse an outbound research worker with a public China-hosted website. Keep this investigation website on the existing server. Alibaba's public-website documentation says mainland-hosted websites require ICP registration; the exact applicability to a proposed private outbound worker should be confirmed with the provider rather than assumed from that website rule. [5] No hosting purchase, identity submission, deployment, or account creation was performed for this report. 4. Residential/ISP proxy: could change ASN reputation, but no vendor, provenance or target-specific success was verified. Not the first purchase. A mainland/HK location label does not prove IP location, permission to use the endpoint, or reliable access. Prefer a reproducible VPS baseline and first-party APIs. An operator-provided official export/API would help more than moving IPs when the blocker is authentication. FIRST-PARTY SEARCH APIS Baidu Qianfan provides POST https://qianfan.baidubce.com/v2/ai_search/web_search, returning reference URLs/titles/snippets/date fields. search_source is baidu_search_v2; standard web top_k supports up to 50 and site/time filtering is documented. The query length limit is 72 characters with a Chinese character counting as two, so avoid feeding long bot prompts unchanged. This is a potential retrieval service, not a target publishing endpoint. No calls made, key not available to this subtask. API documentation has differing auth header examples (Authorization versus X-Appbuilder-Authorization); follow the console's current generated example when onboarding. [6] Published Baidu rates: standard CNY 0.036/call, enhanced CNY 0.072/call. Free allocation 1500/month distributed about 50/day, not a 1500-query burst. Standard 1000 billable searches therefore cost CNY 36; 10000 cost CNY 360 at list pay-as-you-go, before free usage. Default rate limit 1QPS, 3QPS after postpaid activation. A 10000-call one-year prepaid package lists CNY 352. Real-name verification is documented for service activation; no onboarding eligibility for this user was verified. [7] Tencent Web Search API is another first-party Chinese index/ecosystem option, documented as retrieving public web resources plus Tencent content. Pricing, account eligibility and retrieval quality not verified here. Treat it as an alternative to evaluate, not a promised complete crawl. [8] Neither search API makes inaccessible origin pages available automatically. Save raw API results and then independently retrieve original URLs or dated archives. Search absence, especially with ranking/filtering/index limitations, cannot exclude a Chinese swarm. SOURCES (official provider pages accessed 2026-09-05) [1] Tencent Lighthouse Pricing Details, page dated 2025-06-23, currently returned by official site: https://intl.cloud.tencent.com/document/product/1103/47794?lang=en [2] Alibaba Create a Simple Application Server, updated 2026-05-27: https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/simple-application-server/user-guide/create-a-server [3] Alibaba Instance families/specifications, updated 2026-08-26: https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/simple-application-server/product-overview/instance-families/ [4] Alibaba Individual identity verification, updated 2026-07-11: https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/account/verify-your-identity-individual-account [5] Alibaba ICP filing for general websites, updated 2026-06-18: https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/icp-filing/basic-icp-service/product-overview/icp-filing-requirements-for-a-regular-website [6] Baidu search API, updated 2026-08-14: https://cloud.baidu.com/doc/qianfan/s/2mh4su4uy [7] Baidu search billing, updated 2026-08-12: https://cloud.baidu.com/doc/qianfan/s/1mh4sv6c4 [8] Tencent Web Search API: https://cloud.tencent.com/product/wsa