China Trending Scraper: Douyin, Baidu, Toutiao and Sina hot lists (热搜 / 热榜)

Get the real-time trending topics of the Chinese internet in one run and in one format. This scraper reads the public hot lists (热搜榜, 热榜, 排行榜) of 7 Chinese platforms: Douyin 抖音热榜, Baidu 百度热搜, Toutiao 今日头条热榜, 36Kr 36氪, The Paper 澎湃新闻, Sina 新浪热榜 and NetEase News 网易新闻. Each entry has its rank, title, link, heat value (热度), label (新 / 热 / 爆) and category. No login, no cookies from your account and no API key.

Only sources whose robots.txt allows automated access are included.

Built to run on a schedule (for example every hour) so you can build a history of what China is talking about.

What data you get

• Platform and board (which list the entry comes from), in English and Chinese
• Rank on the list (1 = top)
• Title (the topic, search term, article or video title, in Chinese)
• Link to the topic, search results, article or video
• Heat value as a number (hotValue), plus what it measures (hotValueType: heat index, views, reads, comments or saves). Chinese units such as 万 and 亿 are converted, so "374万" becomes 3740000
• Label shown on the list, such as 新 (new), 热 (hot), 爆 (exploding), 首发, 独家 or 辟谣
• Category, where the platform gives one (Toutiao, The Paper)
• Description or excerpt, image URL, author or source, and publish date where available
• The platform's own ID for the entry (id), handy for de-duplicating across scheduled runs
• fetchedAt: when the list was collected (the same value for every item in one run)

Supported platforms and boards

Platform (platforms value)	Boards	Heat value means
Douyin 抖音 (douyin)	hot 热榜, rising 实时上升	Heat index
Baidu 百度 (baidu)	realtime 热搜, livelihood 民生, finance 财经, sports 体育, phrase 热梗, novel 小说, movie 电影, teleplay 电视剧, car 汽车	Search heat index
Toutiao 今日头条 (toutiao)	头条热榜	Heat index
36Kr 36氪 (kr36)	hot 人气榜, video 视频榜, comment 热议榜, collect 收藏榜	Reads, views, comments or saves
The Paper 澎湃新闻 (thepaper)	热榜	None (rank only)
Sina 新浪 (sina)	all 新浪热榜, hotcmnt 热议榜, minivideo 视频热榜, trend 潮流, sport 体育, ent 娱乐, auto 汽车, travel 旅游, ai AI热榜	Heat index
NetEase News 网易新闻 (netease)	热点	None (rank only)

Sample result

{
  "platform": "douyin",
  "platformName": "Douyin 抖音",
  "board": "hot",
  "boardName": "热榜",
  "rank": 1,
  "title": "西藏那曲发生7级地震",
  "url": "https://www.douyin.com/hot/2709008",
  "hotValue": 11691595,
  "hotValueType": "heat",
  "label": "热",
  "imageUrl": "https://p11-sign.douyinpic.com/tos-cn-p-0015/ok9BHFAvBo3fOg2afqPZA8C0cLIAQPybDiQjEg~noop.jpeg?…",
  "id": "2709008",
  "publishedAt": "2026-10-22T14:45:15.000Z",
  "videoCount": 14,
  "fetchedAt": "2026-10-22T22:20:47.299Z"
}

Every item has the same core fields: platform, platformName, board, boardName, rank, title, url, hotValue, hotValueType, label, category, description, imageUrl and fetchedAt (missing values are null). Some platforms add id, author, publishedAt, videoCount (Douyin) or tags (The Paper).

How to use

Field	What it does
platforms	Platforms to collect. Default: all 7
baiduBoards, douyinBoards, kr36Boards, sinaBoards	Which lists to read on platforms that have more than one. Default: the main list
maxItemsPerPlatform	Keep the top N of each list (each board counts as its own list). Default 50
maxItems	Stop after this many items in total. Default 1,000
proxyConfiguration	Apify Proxy settings. Datacenter proxy works for all platforms

Example inputs:

{ "platforms": ["douyin", "baidu", "toutiao"], "maxItemsPerPlatform": 50 }

{ "platforms": ["baidu", "sina"], "baiduBoards": ["realtime", "finance", "phrase"], "sinaBoards": ["all", "ent"], "maxItemsPerPlatform": 20 }

{ "platforms": ["douyin", "kr36"], "douyinBoards": ["hot", "rising"], "kr36Boards": ["hot", "comment"] }

A run takes about 10 to 20 seconds. Hot lists are short by nature: most have 20 to 50 entries (Douyin's rising list often has fewer than 10), so you get at most that many per list.

Run it on a schedule

Trending lists change by the minute. For monitoring, create an Apify Schedule that runs this actor every hour (or every 10 to 30 minutes for breaking news). Each run saves a full snapshot with the same fetchedAt, so you can chart how a topic climbs and falls, and use platform + id (or title) to spot topics that are new since the last run. Send each snapshot to Google Sheets, BigQuery, Slack or a webhook with Apify integrations.

Pricing

$1 per 1,000 items, charged only for items saved to your dataset. The default run (7 platforms, about 310 items) costs about $0.31. For hourly monitoring, keep only the top of each list: the top 10 of 7 platforms is 70 items, about $0.07 per run or roughly $1.70 a day.

Use cases

• Media monitoring and newsrooms: see what is trending on Douyin, Baidu and Toutiao right now
• Brand and PR teams: get alerted when your brand or a competitor enters a Chinese hot list
• Market and consumer research on China: track topics, products, cars, films and TV series over time
• Content creators and marketers: find trending topics and memes (热梗) to react to
• Data science and AI: build time series of Chinese public attention, train or ground models on current events
• Cross-platform comparison: the same story ranked on Douyin, Baidu, Toutiao and Sina in one table

FAQ

Is it legal? The scraper reads only the public hot lists that every visitor sees without logging in, at a polite pace, and does not get around any login, paywall or captcha. It collects topic titles and links, not personal data. You are responsible for how you use the data, including copyright and local laws.

Do I need a Chinese IP or residential proxy? No. The lists are public and were tested without any Chinese proxy. The default Apify datacenter proxy is enough.

Are the titles translated to English? No. Titles are returned in the original Chinese. Add a translation step in your own pipeline if you need English.

Why is hotValue empty for some items? The Paper and NetEase do not publish a heat number, and Douyin's rising list has none either. Their entries still come with a rank. Heat numbers are not comparable between platforms; use hotValueType and compare within one platform.

Why are some Baidu entries missing? Pinned official topics are skipped so the ranks match the organic list.

Why are some well-known platforms not included? Some sites' robots.txt files disallow automated access to the endpoints that serve their hot lists, so they are left out on purpose. Only sources whose robots.txt allows automated access are included.

What about Xiaohongshu, Kuaishou or WeChat? They need a login or signed requests, so they are not included.

API

Call it from any language with the Apify API or client libraries (apify-client for JavaScript and Python), or connect it to an AI agent through the Apify MCP server, for example to answer "what is trending in China right now?".