TL;DR - Tealium (iQ Tag Management and the Customer Data Hub) can serve visitors in mainland China, but out-of-the-box web experiences that rely on Tealium often underperform without China-specific configuration. Tealium provides a China CDN deployment extension for customers with an ICP license or filing, which improves tag delivery. However, a CDN alone doesn’t handle third-party resources that commonly cause slow or incomplete loads in China. Chinafy detects and handles blocked or slow resources and serves a synchronized, China-optimized version of your pages to visitors in China.

What is Tealium?

Tealium iQ Tag Management and the Customer Data Hub load a single utag.js snippet from Tealium’s servers. That snippet then fetches tags and streams event data to destinations in real time.

Does Tealium work in mainland China?

Not by default. The Tealium platform notes that digital experiences involving Tealium do not reliably work in mainland China.

Why Tealium pages struggle in China

The two primary reasons why web pages using Tealium often perform poorly in mainland China are:

Cross-border delivery & network controls: When tags and libraries originate offshore (i.e. not inside mainland China or in Tealium’s case, not using tags.tiqcdn.cn to load Tealium’s universal tags), China’s constrained network conditions introduce latency or packet loss, so resources may stall or time out. Tealium’s tags are affected like other third-party assets.

Third-party dependencies: Many global sites also load other fonts, trackers, and widgets that are slow or inaccessible in China, compounding the issue even if Tealium assets are accelerated.

How to make Tealium work in China

To make websites or landing pages work in mainland China, there are two key components to consider: its infrastructure and its code.

For businesses with a presence in China (including an ICP), Tealium offers a China CDN option to deliver tags and improve experience. Their China CDN Deployment extension can enable this without source-code changes and can auto-select the best China-based CDN for a given user. A near-China or China-based CDN can improve loading speeds as static assets will be delivered from a node closer to the end user. However, as is the case with onshore hosting, a China CDN only solves part of the problem with cross-border China web performance. A CDN, no matter the locations of its Points of Presence (PoPs), does not handle third-party resources on the code-based side, which are often the primary technical reason why many website pages perform poorly in mainland China.

Chinafy offers a solution to make your website work faster and fuller in mainland China.

Here’s how Chinafy works:

Generates a version of your website/landing page for China visitors without affecting your current site.

Combines both in-person and platform-level features to detect and replace blocked or slow resources that cause loading delays.

If you're hosting offshore, Chinafy routes China-IP-based traffic to the China-optimized version of your site. If you're already hosting onshore, all your traffic will see the optimized version for China visitors.

Chinafy then keeps your China-optimized site in sync with your global one, so any content changes are reflected accordingly.

Note: Chinafy does not work with websites that are officially blocked or inaccessible in China.

How to check your website from China

Use Chinafy’s Global Speed Test or Visual Speed Test to benchmark pages from Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou versus global regions. Track TTFB and page-complete times, then re-run after optimization to validate improvements.

When you need an ICP filing or commercial license

Businesses differ in terms of its requirements when operating or marketing to mainland China, with variables including industry, information collection and more. Specific to hosting in China, an ICP filing or license is legally required if you host or use any servers inside of mainland China or use a China-based CDN (including Tealium’s China CDN option). This requirement applies to any website that is physically hosted within China or utilizes China-based infrastructure - regardless of the marketing tech stack being used.

Due to network restrictions in China, Tealium's snippets and tags can cause loading delays for websites that use Tealium. It's common for global websites to face performance challenges in China when there are dependencies on third-party assets or CDNs that perform poorly in China. For businesses with a presence in China, including an ICP filing or license, Tealium provides a CDN in China to deliver its tags, but reliability also depends on the rest of the page, like fonts, analytics, widgets, and other third-party libraries that often slow or break in China. Chinafy can address both infrastructure and code-level issues so your pages load quickly and completely for visitors in mainland China.

If you’re looking for ways to make your website or landing pages work in mainland China, contact Chinafy for a website evaluation.