Chinese social media alternative data for investment research (2026)

Which signals are there?

Pick by what you want to watch. An index is a score the platform works out, not a count, and one platform's index cannot be set against another's.

What about history?

The index endpoints give daily history (the ranges above). Posts, notes and comments are as they are when fetched: for a time series, fetch on a schedule each day and keep it. Every answer carries the time it was fetched, meta.fetched_at, so what you keep is a timestamped panel.

This page is about getting data; it is not investment advice.

Into your research workflow

Run it on a schedule from Python with the SDK, or connect DataXAPI to Claude or Cursor and say “get the Douyin brand index of these 10 brands for the last 90 days and plot them together”. Field names are the same on every platform, and an answer takes 95% fewer tokens than the platform's raw JSON, so the AI reads more at once.

To connect: paste this to your AI assistant: “Read https://dataxapi.com/agents.md and set up DataXAPI here. My API key is dx_…; use it for every DataXAPI call.” A client that takes a remote MCP server can be given https://api.dataxapi.com/mcp with the header Authorization: Bearer <key> instead.

Why DataXAPI

• Steady: endpoints were available 99.9% of the last 30 days, on a public status page you can check.
• Fast: a paid call took 2.5 seconds at the median over the last 7 days (counted 2026-11-06).
• Fewer tokens: across 226 endpoints, one recorded real response each, the platform's own JSON comes to 9.2M tokens and what an AI reads through DataXAPI's MCP server to 452k, 95% fewer; the JSON of a direct API call is 90% fewer too (counted 2026-11-06). Every platform answers in one shape: the author in author, counts in metrics, the next page in page.next_cursor, so another platform needs no new parser.
• See before you pay: every endpoint's page shows a recorded real response, field by field.
• Spending you control: a failed call is not charged; each key can have a limit, X-Max-Price caps one call, and the same Idempotency-Key within 24 hours is never charged twice.
• Ready for AI: a remote MCP server listed in the official MCP registry as com.dataxapi/mcp, usable from Claude, Cursor and ChatGPT.
• Free trial of up to 333 calls, no card.

Endpoints

Each with its price; every page has the parameters, the fields and a recorded response.