What content is banned on a website in China?

Most advice on this subject is either a scary list of topics or a vague warning to be careful. Neither tells you what to change on your site.

This guide starts from the texts and the cases we could read, and it says where they stop. It’s part of the legal basics of a website in China.

We take no position on the political disputes behind these rules. This page describes how they’re enforced, and it isn’t legal advice.

What content is banned in China?

Nine categories are banned under Article 15 of the Measures on internet information services.¹ They’re broad, and the ninth is open-ended.

#	Banned content (Article 15)	Where a business could slip (our reading)
1	Opposing the basic principles of the Constitution	Political commentary
2	Harming national security, leaking state secrets, subverting state power, undermining national unity	Territory labels, maps
3	Harming national honor and interests	Comments on the state or its symbols
4	Inciting ethnic hatred or discrimination, undermining ethnic unity	Careless copy about ethnic groups
5	Undermining state religious policy, promoting cults or superstition	Religious products, spiritual services
6	Spreading rumors, disturbing social order or stability	Unverified claims about events
7	Obscenity, pornography, gambling, violence, murder, terror, inciting crime	Betting, adult products, graphic images
8	Insulting or defaming others, harming their lawful rights	Attacks on named competitors
9	Anything else banned by laws or administrative regulations	Unbounded: this keeps the list from being a safe checklist

The 2019 Provisions on online content repeat most of this list, and they add some items.

Their Article 6 has 11 categories. New ones include distorting or insulting heroes and martyrs, promoting terrorism or extremism, and rumors that disturb economic order.²

Article 7 is the one marketers tend to miss. It lists nine kinds of “undesirable” content that producers should guard against, even though it isn’t called illegal.² They include:

• Exaggerated titles that don’t match the content
• Hyping scandals or gossip
• Sexual innuendo
• Gory or shocking images
• Discrimination against groups or regions

Superlatives are a separate problem, under advertising law. See banned advertising words in China.

Do these rules reach a site hosted abroad?

Partly, and the texts leave a real gap. The content rules are written for activity inside China, while the blocking rule is written for content from outside it.

Text	Stated scope	What it does to foreign content
Measures, Article 2 1	Internet information services within the PRC	Silent
2019 Provisions, Article 2 2	Online content governance within the PRC	Silent
Cybersecurity Law, Article 52 3	Banned information from outside the PRC	Bodies are told to block its spread
Cybersecurity Law, Article 77 3	Foreign bodies whose activity harms China’s cybersecurity	Legal liability, plus asset freezes or other sanctions in serious cases. We read nothing applying it to ordinary site content
Search Provisions, Articles 7 and 8 4	Search services within the PRC	Engines drop results clearly containing banned content

We read no text or decision saying Article 15 penalties apply to a foreign site with no Chinese presence. We also read nothing saying they can’t. Treat that as open, and ask a local adviser.

A 2026 draft would address this gap

On July 3, 2026, the Cyberspace Administration of China reopened comment on a full rewrite of the Measures, now 94 articles. Comments closed on August 2, and we found no final text as of November 1, 2026.²⁸

It’s only a draft, its start date is blank, and it can change. These are the parts that matter here.

Draft article 28	What it says
Article 24	Still nine categories, reworded, and it binds users as well as providers. The wording adds false or misleading information, disparaging soldiers and veterans, and harm to intellectual property rights
Article 25	Providers should guard against undesirable content, including hype about major policies, emergencies and major cases
Article 29	If foreign organizations or individuals spread Article 24 content that harms national security and the public interest, authorities may take “necessary measures” under relevant laws
Article 92	Foreign organizations or individuals providing internet information services into the PRC must follow Chinese laws and rules

Article 2 of the draft still speaks of services within the PRC, so how these parts fit together isn’t settled. If it’s adopted, ask a local adviser what it changes for you.

Four gates your content can meet

Whatever the texts say, your content can be stopped at any of four points.

Gate	Who acts	What can happen	Site hosted abroad?
Your host	Mainland cloud provider	Transmission stopped, including URL blocking 6	Not relevant
The firewall	Authorities, under Article 52	Technical measures to block the spread 3	Yes
Search engines	The engine	Clearly banned results dropped, records kept, a report to the cyberspace office 4	Yes, through the engine
Regulators	Cyberspace, market and public security authorities	Orders, closure, fines, and criminal liability in serious cases 18	In the cases we read, the target had a Chinese business or market

Article 52 doesn’t name the firewall. That label is ours, and what the Great Firewall means for your website covers the mechanism.

Under Article 20 of the Measures, breaching Article 15 can bring criminal liability or public security penalties. A licensed operator can lose its license, and a filed site can be closed.¹

AWS China’s April 2026 notice shows the first gate at work. It cites the amended Cybersecurity Law, in force since January 1, 2026, and reserves the right to stop transmission, including by URL blocking.⁶

Cloudflare says its partner JD Cloud must review the content of every domain before its China Network is enabled.⁷

So on mainland infrastructure, your content answers to your provider’s rules as well as the law. See ICP filing vs ICP license.

If your site is already unreachable, content is only one possible cause. Read why websites get blocked in China first.

Geography: where businesses actually get caught

Every foreign-company penalty we read in this area involved place names or maps, not opinions. Most were lists, not statements.

Date	Company	Where it appeared	What was wrong	Outcome
Jan 2018	Marriott	Member email survey, website, app 8	Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and Tibet shown beside China as country options	Chinese site and app shut for a week, investigation opened 8
Jan 2018	Zara	An option on zara.cn 9	Taiwan called a country	Correct, and apologize on the site by 18:00 that day 9
Jan 2018	Medtronic	Country option on medtronic.com 9	“Republic of China (Taiwan)” listed among countries	Same order 9
Jan 2018	Delta	Website 10	Taiwan and Tibet listed as countries	Public apology and investigation demanded 10
Jan 2018	Muji	Store map in a furniture catalog distributed in Chongqing 25	Beijing said it left out the Diaoyu Islands and labeled Taiwan incorrectly	Catalog ordered destroyed 25
May 2018	Muji	Product packaging 11	Taiwan given as a country of origin	RMB 200,000 fine, under advertising law 11
Dec 2021	7-Eleven unit, Beijing	Map on its website 24	Taiwan as a country, islands left out or without Chinese names, border errors 1224	Warning, map to be revised, and a fine: about RMB 150,000 in most reports 1224, RMB 50,000 in one 30

Three patterns stand out, and the last one matters most.

• It’s rarely a page you’d think to review. Marriott’s problem surfaced in a customer email and survey, then in a website destination list and an app dropdown.⁸
• Speed mattered. Zara and Medtronic had hours to fix the page and publish an apology.⁹
• Every named target had a Chinese business or market. Shanghai’s notice went to the operating entities of the sites.⁹ Delta flies to China under a Chinese regulator.¹⁰

The Marriott case shows why a mistake can have more than one legal hook. Local authorities said it was suspected of breaching both the Cybersecurity Law and the Advertising Law.⁸

Bird & Bird summarizes the advertising principle at stake: advertisements mustn’t harm China’s dignity or interests.¹³

How to label places

Avoid the word “country” on any list that includes these places, but don’t expect a new heading to solve it.

John Yunker, a website globalization consultant, warns that “Select Country” is the risky message and recommends dropping flags from site selectors.¹⁶

Marriott’s app dropdown already read “Country/Region”, and National Business Daily still reported it because China and Taiwan sat side by side.⁸

BNP Paribas relabeled its entry “Taiwan, China” after criticism in 2019.²³

Maps need their own check

Maps have their own regulation, and it goes well beyond national borders. A world map on your “our offices” page falls into this subject.

The Map Management Regulations, in force since January 1, 2016, say:⁵

• Banned on maps (Article 8): content harming national unity, sovereignty, territorial integrity, security or ethnic unity, plus state secrets.
• Borders (Article 10): China’s national border must follow the standard sample map, and borders between other countries a reference sample map.
• Review (Article 15): maps made public must go through review, except simple ones such as scenic-area, street and subway maps.
• Display (Article 24): nobody may publish or display maps that fail national standards.
• Penalties (Articles 49 and 50): correction, a warning, confiscation and a fine of up to RMB 100,000.

Exempt doesn’t mean unregulated. Under Article 50, a map that needs no review can still be penalized if it fails the standards.⁵

Reported fines run higher. Their sources don’t always name the law, and the 7-Eleven figure exceeds that cap without explanation.

Case	Where the map was	Reported fine
A marketing company, unnamed 13	An advertisement	RMB 1 million
Bright Dairy, a Chinese company, 2020 26	A video ad on its own website	RMB 300,000
7-Eleven unit, Beijing, 2021 24	Its website	About RMB 150,000, under Articles 15 and 37 as Taiwan News reports it

Internet map services have a chapter of their own. For instance, Article 34 requires servers storing map data to sit in mainland China.⁵ We read nothing on whether a simple embedded map makes a site a provider of such a service.

The Ministry of Natural Resources also issued a specification on public map content in February 2023.²⁹ We read the notice, not the attached text, so ask a local adviser to check it.

Article 2 covers map activity within the PRC.⁵ How it applies to a site hosted abroad wasn’t addressed in anything we read.

Free check

Is your website visible on Baidu?

Enter your website. We check Baidu, access from China and how your site is set up, then email you the report.

Your websiteCheck my site

Is there a list of banned words?

Not an official one that we could find. The lists in circulation come from vendors, leaks and researchers, and they describe different systems.

Source	What it describes	Limit
Rambert et al., 2021 17	Firewall keyword filter	Matched in HTTP requests, and no evidence of inspection of HTTP responses
Citizen Lab, 2023 14	Search box rules on eight platforms	Triggered by the query, not by your page
Chinafy 18	A commercial watch-list	Its own page says no 100% accuracy
Jing Daily, 2018 19	Ten taboo topics for luxury brands	Includes Japan and K-pop, and the page we could read cites no law

Two findings change how you should read these lists.

First, the firewall’s list moves fast. The 2021 study found over 85% of forbidden keywords replaced since 2014, with new ones tied to recent events.¹⁷ Any list you buy is a snapshot.

Second, that filter looked at requests. The study found no evidence of inspection of HTTP responses, or of bulk decryption of HTTPS.¹⁷

So we found no support for the idea that one word in your page text trips it.

That doesn’t make the words harmless. The same study saw a reaction to forbidden host names, so a domain name can matter.¹⁷ Other readers can see your page, including search engines, hosts and regulators, and the study is five years old.

What this means for search visibility

Sometimes your page isn’t the problem at all. The query is.

Citizen Lab reported over 60,000 unique rules across eight platforms.¹⁴ Some return nothing. Others show only authorized sources, typically Chinese government sites and state media.¹⁵

In its October 2022 test of 18,863 names, Baidu censored 219 and Bing 189.¹⁵ Bing fully blanked none of them, and its rules applied only to users in mainland China.¹⁴¹⁵

So on certain queries, a foreign site may have no way to appear. That’s our inference, since the researchers measured queries, not individual sites. Don’t build a keyword plan on those topics.

Legal ban

• A text
• An authority
• A penalty

Technical filter

• A query or a domain
• No explanation given

Public reaction

• Online criticism and apologies
• Sometimes with no rule at all

A word list only deals with the second.

The third risk in that visual deserves a mention. BNP Paribas’s 2019 trouble came from Chinese netizens going through its site after an employee’s personal post, as finews.asia tells it.²³ Lists like Jing Daily’s also name topics, such as K-pop, that no text we read bans.¹⁹ Your Chinese reviewer should judge both law and reaction.

Topics that need a license, not just care

Some subjects are allowed only for licensed operators, however careful your wording. Both of these rules cover services within China.²¹²²

Topic	Rule	What it means
Religion	2021 Measures, Article 6, in force March 1, 2022 21	A license is needed, and foreign organizations or individuals and the entities they set up in China can’t provide these services there
Religious commerce	2021 Measures, Article 14(9) 21	Commercial promotion in religion’s name is on the banned list
News	2017 Provisions, Articles 2 and 5 22	A license is needed for reports and commentary on politics, the economy, the military, diplomacy and sudden events

The news definition is wide, and it mentions the economy. We read nothing on whether a company’s market commentary counts as a news service. Ask a local adviser if you plan to publish it from China.

If you sell in a regulated field such as health or finance, expect more rules than this page covers.

How to review your site before you publish

Start with your lists, not your articles, because that’s where the documented mistakes sit. A person who reads Chinese should do this, and it doesn’t replace legal advice.

1. Export every list. Check country, region, shipping and phone-code menus, in forms and in your app.
2. Search your Chinese text. Look for 国家 (country) near 台湾, 香港, 澳门 and 西藏, the names of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and Tibet.
3. Find every map and flag. Include images, PDFs, presentations and icons in a language selector.
4. Read the translation. A machine can turn “countries where we operate” into exactly the wrong list. See whether machine translation is good enough.
5. Check what others can publish. Under Article 16, providers within scope must stop clearly banned content, keep records and report it.¹ Comments and uploads need an owner.
6. Include your emails and surveys. Marriott’s problem surfaced in a mailing.⁸ The same applies to your WeChat account, where platforms can restrict or close accounts.²
7. Name who can act fast. Someone should be able to change a live page within hours.

1. Country list with Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao or TibetFix first
2. World or China mapReplace
3. Flag selectorRemove
4. Clickbait titleRewrite
5. Open commentsModerate

The bottom line

The banned list is broad, but the documented mistakes are narrow: place names, country lists and maps.

Fix those first. Then accept that nobody can certify your site as safe, because the rules are open-ended and the filters aren’t published. Keep an eye on the 2026 draft, which could change the answer for sites run from abroad.

How Index in China can help

We translate your site into Simplified Chinese with a human reviewer and work on getting it indexed by Chinese search engines.

We don’t give legal advice or clear content, and we’ll tell you when your case needs a local adviser. See what we do, or book a 30-minute call.

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