Originally published at 51发现导航 (51 Discovery Navigation).

If you live in, travel to, or build products for mainland China, you quickly learn that the usual AI toolkit — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Midjourney — is hard to rely on there. Access is blocked or unstable, sign-up often needs a foreign phone number, and payment is another hurdle. The good news: by 2026 the Chinese AI ecosystem has matured to the point where you can cover almost every daily workflow with tools that open directly on a Chinese network, register with a local phone number, and offer generous free tiers.

This guide is organized by use case, with a short note on what each tool is best at.

1. Chat assistants

  • DeepSeek – Strong reasoning and coding, free web and mobile apps, and a cheap API. If you only install one Chinese assistant, start here.
  • Kimi (Moonshot AI) – Best-in-class long-context reading. Drop in a 300-page PDF and ask questions about it.
  • Doubao (ByteDance) – Polished consumer app with voice chat, image understanding and writing help.
  • Qwen / Tongyi (Alibaba) – Good for office documents; the open-weight Qwen models are also popular with developers.
  • Tencent Yuanbao – Useful because it can search WeChat Official Account articles, a huge body of Chinese content that Western search engines barely index.

2. AI search

  • Metaso (秘塔 AI 搜索) – Ad-free answers with citations; its research mode produces structured reports with outlines.
  • Nano AI Search / Tiangong – Mixed text-and-image results and quick slide generation.

3. Coding

  • Trae – ByteDance's AI IDE. It works directly in China, ships multiple models and has a free tier, which is why it is the most common Cursor alternative locally. See a detailed Cursor vs Trae comparison.
  • Tongyi Lingma, CodeGeeX, Baidu Comate – IDE plugins for VS Code and JetBrains with free individual plans.

4. Images, video and design

  • Jimeng (即梦) and Kling (可灵) – Text-to-image and image-to-video. Kling's motion quality is among the best anywhere, and both refresh free credits daily.
  • LiblibAI – China's largest Stable Diffusion model community.
  • CapCut / Jianying – Free AI captions, voice-over and avatars for short video.

5. Office and meetings

  • WPS AI – AI writing and summarization inside WPS documents, sheets and slides.
  • iFlytek Spark & Tingjian – Excellent Mandarin transcription, live captions and meeting notes.
  • Feishu (Lark) Minutes – Meeting transcription with a free quota.

6. Practical tips for using AI in China

  1. Check availability before you commit. AI products change pricing and access rules constantly. A directory that tests availability daily saves time — 51发现导航 marks every listed site as available, slow or down.
  2. Mind data residency. For business data, prefer providers with a registered Chinese entity and clear privacy terms.
  3. Have a fallback. If you depend on Claude and your account gets suspended, migrate to local options. Here is a curated list of Claude alternatives, ranked by accessibility in China.
  4. Use the APIs. DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi and GLM all offer OpenAI-compatible APIs, so switching an existing app often means changing only the base URL and the model name.

Conclusion

You no longer need a VPN-dependent setup to get serious AI work done in China. A practical 2026 stack looks like this: DeepSeek or Doubao for chat, Kimi for long documents, Metaso for research, Trae for coding, Kling and Jimeng for visuals, and WPS AI for office work. For a continuously updated list, visit the AI tools accessible in China page.