Chinese internet research without the API key scavenger hunt

What it does last30days-cn is an AI Agent skill—packaged for Claude Code, Cursor, and OpenClaw—that searches eight Chinese platforms including Weibo, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, and Zhihu for content published in the last 30 days. It aggregates results, handles date-windowing in Beijing time, and emits structured research reports with offline HTML output. Think of it as a very opinionated research assistant that only reads yesterday’s news.

The interesting bit The project is essentially a deep localization of an existing English skill, but the heavy lifting is a three-tier fallback stack: it tries official APIs first, then pivots to Playwright browser automation, and finally falls back to public search indexes like Bing. This means seven of the eight supported platforms require zero API keys if you accept the moral complexity of browser automation.

Key highlights

• Covers Weibo, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, Zhihu, Douyin, WeChat, Baidu, and Toutiao in a single query.
• Smart degradation from API → Playwright crawler → public search, with cookie persistence to reduce repeated logins.
• Generates self-contained HTML reports styled for reading, printing, and archival without an internet connection.
• Optional jieba tokenization with a CJK bigram fallback, so the skill runs even on minimal environments.
• Includes a --diagnose mode that probes platform availability and browser binary compatibility.

Caveats

• The README spends considerable space on legal disclaimers: the tool is explicitly for research only, users bear full legal risk under Chinese cybersecurity and data-protection laws, and commercial use is prohibited.
• Platform interfaces change constantly; the authors warn that anti-crawling countermeasures (like Xiaohongshu’s XHR intercepts) are an ongoing arms race and functionality may break without warning.
• WeChat data still benefits from an API key; without it, you rely on Sogou search results.

Verdict Worth a look if you are an AI agent user who needs grounded, time-boxed research on Chinese internet discourse. Skip it if you need guaranteed long-term stability or a fully sanctioned, ToS-compliant data pipeline—this is pragmatic glue code with a side of legal anxiety.