July 25, 2026
How to Get China Market Data: Box Office, Listed Companies, and Charts
China publishes an unusual amount of market data in public, and almost none of it reaches the English-language data vendors. Box office grosses update in real time. Every listed company files through one portal. Music and film rankings are open. This guide covers how to export each in bulk.
Real-time China box office from Maoyan Piaofang
Maoyan Piaofang (猫眼票房) is the reference source for Chinese box office. It publishes during the day, not after it, which is why distributors and trade press quote it rather than waiting for a monthly aggregate.
The Maoyan box office export returns, for every currently-screening film: daily revenue, market share, screening counts, seat occupancy, and cumulative totals. It also pulls film-detail enrichment — genre, cast, director, and Maoyan rating.
Seat occupancy is the field worth calling out. Revenue tells you what a film earned; occupancy tells you whether the screens it was given were full. A film with high revenue and low occupancy is being carried by screen count, and that is the signal that shows up before a drop, not after.
Because the data is daily, the useful move is to run this on a schedule and accumulate a time series. Chinese box office is highly seasonal — Spring Festival and the National Day holiday distort any window that includes them — so a single snapshot is close to meaningless and a year of daily snapshots is genuinely valuable.
Listed-company filings from CNINFO
CNINFO (cninfo.com.cn) is the designated disclosure portal for the Shenzhen and Shanghai exchanges. Every annual report, interim report, material announcement, and shareholding change from every A-share listed company is published there first.
The CNINFO export pulls those filings by exchange plate. For anyone tracking Chinese listed companies, this is the primary source — the same relationship EDGAR has to US filings.
Two practical notes. Filings are predominantly in Chinese, and the announcement PDFs use CJK font encodings that not every PDF text extractor handles; the export handles the retrieval, and you should test your own downstream text pipeline against a sample before assuming it works. Second, disclosure volume is enormous — several hundred thousand filings a year across the market — so filter by plate and date rather than attempting the whole corpus.
Regulatory actions from CSRC
CNINFO carries what companies disclose. The CSRC export carries what the regulator does about it: enforcement actions, administrative penalties (行政处罚), licensing approvals (行政许可), regulatory notices, and IPO registration results, including provincial bureau announcements.
Enforcement data is the part that rarely reaches Western databases at all. If you are screening Chinese counterparties, penalty history from the regulator is a materially different signal from anything a commercial risk database will have.
Rich lists and unicorn valuations from Hurun
Hurun publishes 45 ranking lists, and they are the standard reference for Chinese private wealth and private-company valuation. The Hurun export covers all of them — China Rich List, Global Unicorn Index, U30 and U40 founder lists, Global Rich List — returning rank position, entity names in both Chinese and English, valuations and net worth in CNY and USD, industry, HQ location, and year-over-year rank change.
The bilingual name fields do real work here. Matching Chinese companies across datasets is mostly an entity-resolution problem, and having both name forms on the same record is what makes a join to Western data possible at all.
Music and film charts: NetEase and Douban
Two more sources cover Chinese cultural consumption.
The NetEase Cloud Music export pulls track rankings from 网易云音乐 toplists through the public API — playlist information, rank positions, artist and album metadata, and popularity scores. It is the practical input for music-licensing research and for catalog-migration tooling between Chinese and Western streaming services.
The Douban export covers the Top 250 movies, Top 250 books, and music charts. Douban ratings are the closest Chinese analogue to a combined IMDb and Goodreads, and they diverge from Western ratings on the same titles in ways that are the whole point of pulling them.
Patents from CNIPA
The CNIPA patent export covers Chinese patent records, searchable by keyword, IPC classification, assignee, or date range. Records come back bilingual — Chinese and English title and abstract — with inventors, assignees, CPC and IPC codes, legal status, and patent family information.
China files more patents annually than any other jurisdiction, so for technology landscaping this is not an optional supplement to US and EP data.
Source coverage at a glance
| Source | Domain | Search by | Notable output |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maoyan Piaofang | Box office | Currently screening | Daily revenue, market share, seat occupancy |
| CNINFO | Listed-company filings | Exchange plate, date | Annual and interim reports, announcements |
| CSRC | Securities regulation | Category | Penalties, approvals, IPO registration |
| Hurun | Wealth and valuation | List | Rank, valuation CNY/USD, bilingual names |
| NetEase Cloud Music | Music charts | Toplist | Rank, artist, album, popularity |
| Douban | Film, book, music | Chart | Ranked items with ratings |
| CNIPA | Patents | Keyword, IPC, assignee | Bilingual records, legal status, family |
The language problem, honestly
Every source here publishes primarily in Chinese. The exports return the source's own fields, which means Chinese text in most of them — Hurun and CNIPA are the two that carry English alongside.
That is a real cost and worth planning for rather than discovering. Company names, film titles, and industry classifications will need either a translation step or a matching strategy that works on Chinese strings. The identifiers that survive translation — stock codes, patent numbers, IPC classes — are the reliable join keys, and any pipeline that depends on matching translated names will drift.
Which export do I need?
- Film industry tracking — Maoyan daily, accumulated into a time series.
- Equity research on A-shares — CNINFO for filings, CSRC for enforcement history.
- Private-company valuation and wealth research — Hurun, using the bilingual names as join keys.
- Music licensing and catalog work — NetEase toplists.
- Technology landscaping — CNIPA, joined to US and EP patent data on family identifiers.
For streaming and box office outside China, see Streaming Charts and Box Office Data. For company registries in other markets, see How to Get Company Registry Data in Bulk.