114 — China-access infrastructure: what a new worker would actually test
September 5, 2026. Consolidation of measured routes; no new purchase or site probe.

Decision for the xinzhai investigation
The current server can retrieve the source paste site, public code-index results, Gitee project search, ModelScope catalogs and several global registries. July and August archive searches have completed on the existing AWS host. Our immediate gap is a matching public artifact or implementation, not demonstrated inability to fetch the xinzhai posts. A Hong Kong worker is an optional access experiment for specific blocked surfaces; it is not an established solution to this attribution gap.

Measured access and scope
- Gitee089/090: normal browser project search and its observed public widget route work. Project metadata search is not global code or gist search. Earlier gist authentication errors remain a separate limitation.
- GitCode093: normal browser project discovery works. Signed-out code-search configuration was disabled; direct query routes received WAF responses or ambiguous empty output. A new IP has not been shown to enable that feature.
- ModelScope100/101: documented unauthenticated GET searches for models, datasets, Studios and skills work, with positive controls. These catalogs do not establish source-file or log coverage. The browser's empty search display was invalid as a negative because its non-GET requests were locally blocked.
- BWiki032: a small public recentchanges response worked from both existing servers. Huiji challenges persisted on both. These were single-pass observations, not guarantees of current access.
- Baidu032/113: one earlier query worked; later requests returned challenges. Treat this route as intermittent and unavailable in the latest checked round. Repeating challenged requests without a new discriminator adds no research coverage.
- Common Crawl081/111: the recovered Ubuntu-alias robots capture excluded CCBot; the July copy search completed successfully elsewhere in the corpus. Geographic routing cannot retroactively create missing archive captures.
- Global catalogs112: PyPI's documented JSON route and npm metadata search work here. The PyPI browser challenge did not imply that every documented route was blocked.

Useful next infrastructure experiment
If a Hong Kong or Singapore worker becomes available, compare the same specific blocked public URL and a positive control from both machines in the same time window. Retain final URL, status, body hash, response type and actual relevant content. A login page, challenge or irrelevant search page is not success. Repeat at a second time before expanding traffic. Keep the existing portable probe as a historical fixed-target benchmark; its ten-URL list predates the newer successful catalog routes and includes already-known authentication limits.
Portable kit: http://178.105.23.35:8090/china/downloads/vantage-probe.zip
Baseline comparison032 and procurement notes063 remain available. No bulk corpus migration is needed for this small comparison.

Provider facts checked today
Alibaba's setup documentation says plans vary by region and the purchase console is definitive. Hong Kong and Singapore use international bandwidth; the region cannot be changed after instance creation. These facts do not demonstrate better access to our blocked targets. No fresh checkout quote or capacity confirmation is claimed here.
https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/simple-application-server/user-guide/create-a-server

Costs and state
The existing AWS host and its8.6TB ephemeral corpus remain intact. All three completed copy scans are terminal. Cloud hosting and search API costs remain separate from the OpenRouter guard. No extra machine, proxy subscription or account was purchased. This report changes the access decision guidance, not the research attribution.