Faster Dynamic Routes for China-Based Users
Serving customers in mainland China has always presented a specific set of challenges for global applications. While static content can be cached locally, requests for dynamic content—those that must reach an origin server—traditionally had to cross borders over congested public internet paths, leading to high latency and packet loss.
Cloudflare first addressed the caching challenge in 2021 by upgrading its China Network in partnership with JD Cloud. This allowed customers to serve cached content from data centers within China rather than routing every request overseas. However, the performance bottleneck for uncacheable, origin-bound traffic remained.
In early 2023, Cloudflare introduced China Express, a connectivity suite built with partners China Mobile International (CMI), CBC Tech, and Niaoyun. The offering is designed to solve the cross-border problem through an optimized, high-quality circuit called Private Link. It provides a more reliable and higher-performance connection from China to the global internet.
A Case of Congestion and Timeouts
Consider a hypothetical global e-commerce platform, "Acme Corp," with the majority of its suppliers located in mainland China and its consumer-facing stores operating overseas. Acme had enabled the Cloudflare China Network to accelerate access to its backend systems for suppliers, and while static content delivery was satisfactory, dynamic requests struggled.
Origin pulls traversing the public internet experienced severe performance degradation and packet loss, manifesting as intermittent timeouts. This is a common symptom of cross-border network congestion and the unpredictable nature of ISP routing in and out of China. As the business scaled post-pandemic, an increasing share of supplier traffic became dynamic and uncacheable, which amplified the issue and placed a growing administrative burden on IT staff who had to manage these network faults.
Choosing a Private Link Path
Acme Corp required a solution that would improve cross-border performance and minimize origin-pull timeouts without the management overhead associated with traditional private lines from third-party vendors—a process often prone to human error and complex configuration.
The organization selected a Private Link service from Cloudflare's partner CMI. The architecture routes traffic as follows:
- End users in mainland China connect to an edge data center within the Cloudflare China Network.
- Cached static content is served directly from one of these local data centers.
- Dynamic origin-pull requests are routed through a tunnel to a partner data center in Hong Kong.
- From the Hong Kong partner node, the requests continue to the origin server.
The result was a complete elimination of the timeout issue. Performance metrics collected during peak hours showed significant gains.
Real-World Performance Metrics
Analysis of peak-hour data from 20:00 to 02:00 +1 CST, broken into five-minute intervals, reveals how the solution performs under load:
Strategic Value
For global organizations seeking stable, high-performance access for mainland China users, China Express fills a critical gap. By pairing in-country caching through the China Network with a dedicated private path for dynamic content, businesses can achieve measurable improvements in stability and responsiveness while offloading the operational complexity of managing cross-border network infrastructure from their IT teams. Cloudflare's experts can help scope a solution tailored to your specific connectivity needs.
