China Daily Scraper

Extract full article text or the newest headlines from China Daily (chinadaily.com.cn), China's official English-language state newspaper — no account or subscription needed.

Why use this actor

• No account or login required — fully free, open-access site with no paywall
• Full article text included, not just a summary — headline, byline, publish/modified dates, reconstructed into clean paragraphs
• Also fetches the newest headlines from the homepage without visiting each article individually (the site's RSS feed and sitemap are both stale/dead artifacts, so this actor works around that automatically)
• Stable JSON output suitable for pipelines, spreadsheets, or databases
• Automatic retries on temporary network hiccups

How it works

1. Give the actor one or more article URLs, or switch to "latest" mode to get the newest stories automatically.
2. In article mode, the actor opens each URL and pulls out the full text and every publicly available detail about the story.
3. In latest mode, the actor reads the homepage and returns the newest stories in chronological order.
4. Results stream into your dataset, ready to download as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

You don't need to manage retries, rate limits, or figure out the site's internal data format — the actor handles all of that.

Input

Article mode (default):

{
  "mode": "article",
  "urls": [
    "https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202608/24/WS6a8c22eb45ce1d77cb5e1e70.html"
  ],
  "maxConcurrency": 4,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"] }
}

Latest headlines mode:

{
  "mode": "latest",
  "limit": 10,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"] }
}

Field	Type	Description
mode	string	"article" (default) — extract one or more article URLs. "latest" — fetch the newest headlines.
url	string	A single article URL. Used in article mode.
urls	array	Multiple article URLs to extract in one run. Used in article mode.
limit	integer	Max headlines returned in latest mode. Default 10, max 100.
maxConcurrency	integer	How many article pages to fetch in parallel. Default 4, max 16.
proxyConfiguration	object	Apify Proxy configuration. Residential is on by default.

Output

Article mode — one record per URL:

{
  "_input": "https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202608/24/WS6a8c22eb45ce1d77cb5e1e70.html",
  "_source": "S1-html",
  "headline": "Xi congratulates Alamgir on assuming Bangladeshi presidency",
  "description": null,
  "articleBody": "BEIJING -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday extended congratulations...",
  "author": null,
  "publisher": "Xinhua",
  "datePublished": "2026-08-24T18:54:46+08:00",
  "dateModified": "..."
}

Latest mode — one record per headline:

{
  "_input": "latest",
  "_source": "S2-html-listing",
  "title": "China, Indonesia power the next stage of development",
  "link": "https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202608/24/WS6a8c110545ce1d77cb5e1e58.html",
  "urlDate": "2026-08-24"
}

A failed URL (removed article, network issue) still produces a row instead of silently disappearing:

{
  "_input": "https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202608/24/WS0000000000000000000000.html",
  "_source": "none",
  "_error": "not_found",
  "_errorDetail": ""
}

Notes

• author/description come back null on wire-service (Xinhua) content with no named byline — this is a real absence in the source, not a bug.
• latest mode's urlDate is day-precision only (derived from the URL path) — fetch the article in article mode for the exact publish timestamp.
• No paywall was found on any sampled article — full text is included for every successfully fetched URL.