How to Run Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) in China: China CDN vs Adobe Managed Services vs a Delivery Layer

The short version. An Adobe Experience Manager site needs two things to work in mainland China: a Chinese legal entity with an ICP filing, and a way to deliver the whole page to a visitor inside China, not just the static files. There are three ways to do the second. A China CDN in front of your global AEM (Adobe’s documented “bring your own CDN” path) caches static files only. Adobe-hosted in China (Managed Services with publishers inside China) moves the publish tier, and Dynamic Media, the Adobe tags, forms and search still cross the border. A delivery layer (the 21YunBox Optimizer) keeps AEM where it is and serves every request on the page from a licensed domain inside China. None of the three needs a second AEM instance or a separate China site. Side-by-side table and FAQ below.

Adobe’s guidance for China is short. Edge Delivery Services “are currently operated outside of China,” and serving visitors there “requires a customer-managed Content Delivery Network (BYOCDN).” The same page adds that “CDN operators in China require customers to provide an Internet Content Provider (ICP) license or ICP recordal.” That’s Adobe’s own China FAQ, and it’s accurate. Read it plainly: Adobe keeps AEM global, you bring a China CDN, and you bring the license.

For most of the last decade the China CDN AEM customers brought was Akamai’s. Akamai decommissioned its China CDN on June 30, 2026. A lot of AEM teams are now looking at the “China CDN” line on their renewal and asking what replaces it. It’s a good moment to ask the better question: what did that line item actually cover?

The honest answer is: part of the problem. This is the rest of it.

Two gates, in order

Every China site has to get through two gates. The order matters, and a CDN sits in neither.

The first gate is legal. Without it, your site isn’t slow in China — it can’t legally be served at all. The second gate is technical. AEM’s publish tier, Dynamic Media, the Adobe tag stack, your authors’ login, your forms and your search all live outside China, and something has to make each of them work from inside.

A China CDN answers a narrow slice of the second gate: it moves your static files closer. It does nothing for the first gate and nothing for the rest of the second. That’s why it looks cheap, and why Adobe’s documentation describes it as something you bring rather than something Adobe provides.

Gate one: can you legally operate?

In mainland China, a website needs a government filing before it can be served. It’s called an ICP filing (备案). Without it, the domain can’t be served from inside China, full stop. No CDN and no hosting setup gets around it, including Adobe’s. Adobe’s Dynamic Media documentation says it directly: caching content inside China is only allowed “when the delivery domain is licensed,” and the license is the ICP.

To get one you need three things:

1. A Chinese legal entity. The filing is issued to a company registered in China, not to your global parent. If you have a China subsidiary or a WFOE, that’s usually the one.
2. The filing itself. It’s tied to the infrastructure that serves the site, so whoever delivers the site in China is involved in the paperwork. It takes weeks, not days, and under the Measures for the Administration of Internet Information Services it has to be renewed and kept current.
3. Someone who owns it. Not a one-time project. Domain changes, entity changes, infrastructure changes and annual reviews all touch it. When your China CDN vendor leaves the market, as Akamai just did, the filing has to move with you.

This is the part a CDN quote never mentions. A China CDN can be switched on in an afternoon, which is exactly why it feels like the easy first step. Then the domain doesn’t resolve in China, and the question of who owns the entity and the filing lands on the project six weeks before launch.

One practical note for AEM projects: because the filing is tied to the China infrastructure, settle the architecture before starting the paperwork. Filing against a CDN and then moving to a delivery layer, or from in-China publishers to a delivery layer, means doing parts of it twice. We set the filing up on your entity and manage the renewals. If you already have one, we work with it and update it when the infrastructure changes.

Gate two: does it actually work?

Start with where AEM runs, because it decides what’s possible.

AEM as a Cloud Service runs in Adobe’s regions: US East and West, Canada, UK, West Europe, Germany, Singapore, Japan, Australia. None of them is in mainland China, and the Adobe-managed CDN in front of it (Fastly) has no points of presence on the mainland. Adobe Managed Services can be hosted in China; Adobe’s FAQ offers it for customers who, in Adobe’s words, need servers in-country for MLPS, data residency or Baidu SEO. AEM 6.5 on your own servers can run wherever you put it, with on-premise core support planned to end in February 2027.

Whichever you’re on, every China option is really an answer to one question: how does a visitor in Shanghai get the page, the Dynamic Media image, the Target decision, the form post and the search result, and on whose road? There are three answers.

A China CDN in front of global AEM. This is Adobe’s documented path and the one that shows up as a line item: Cloudflare China, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent, Wangsu, and until June 2026, Akamai. Adobe supports a customer-managed CDN on the publish tier “on a case-by-case basis,” and the conditions are telling: you must have “engineering CDN experts that are on call” and “perform and successfully pass a load test before going to production.” The CDN is yours to run. What it does is cache your static files (JavaScript, CSS, images) on servers inside China. What it doesn’t do is touch anything else on the page: the Dynamic Media request to Akamai, the Launch script, the Target call, the Eloqua or Marketo form post, the search query. The CDN doesn’t see those, so it doesn’t help them. And your Dispatcher purge chain now has a third hop that needs an invalidation call.

For a brochure site with mostly static pages, this can be enough, and we’ve seen AEM sites work in China this way for years. If that’s your site, we run this option as a managed service, Managed China CDN (our Managed China Edge Delivery tier), with the ICP filed and maintained for you, so the CDN experts on call that Adobe asks for are ours.

For a site built the way AEM sites are built now, a CDN alone isn’t enough.

Adobe-hosted inside China. The option that gets called “just host it in China.” Adobe stands up a Managed Services publish tier inside the mainland; your authors publish from the global author instance to the China publishers, usually with a China CDN in front. It’s the right answer when your own internal policy says the servers must physically sit in China.

The cost is a second publish tier with its own releases and operations. The ICP is still yours (it’s tied to the delivery domain, not to Adobe). And everything the page calls that isn’t the HTML still crosses the border: Dynamic Media, the Adobe tags, forms, search, commerce.

We have tested sites in exactly this setup, with Adobe-managed publishers inside China, a China CDN in front and an ICP in place. The pattern repeats: the HTML arrives from the China publisher in a second or two, then the page waits on dozens of requests to domains outside China, and the last of them lands close to a minute later. That is full page load, not Core Web Vitals; the assessment reports both. The hosting was in China. The page wasn’t.

A delivery layer over your existing AEM. AEM stays exactly where it is, Cloud Service or Managed Services or 6.5, in whatever region it runs today. A licensed delivery layer inside China handles the visitor. Static files are cached on servers in China. Everything else on the page (the HTML, Dynamic Media, the Adobe tags, forms, search, third-party scripts) is served from your licensed China domain, so the browser sees it as same-origin, and the request back to your origin travels over a managed cross-border connection instead of the open internet. Anything that already works is left alone.

HTML is fetched fresh on every request, so a publish in AEM shows in China immediately with no purge workflow. The cost of that is one cross-border round trip per page, which the assessment measures on your site before anyone commits. If you want edge HTML caching, there’s a purge endpoint Dispatcher can call on publish and unpublish, the same way it called Akamai.

One author instance, one publish tier, one codebase, and the global and China sites stay in parity. This is our 21YunBox Optimizer, and it’s what we recommend for most AEM sites.

None of the three is wrong. They fit different sites. The trouble starts when a China CDN gets quoted for a site that needs the delivery layer, and nobody finds out until the product search returns nothing in Shanghai.

What a China CDN doesn’t touch

When a client first asks about China, they ask about hosting, a CDN and the ICP filing. That’s the part above the waterline. What decides whether the site actually works sits below it, in the application layer, and on an AEM site that layer is mostly Adobe’s own products.

Say the CDN is on and the ICP is done. Here’s what’s still broken on an AEM site, because none of it is a static file served from your domain.

Dynamic Media. This is the one that surprises AEM teams. Your images and video don’t come from your publish tier; they come from Dynamic Media’s delivery domain, which is Akamai’s CDN, and Adobe’s own knowledge base lists China as one of two “restricted areas” for it. Adobe does offer a separate China delivery path, but it needs an ICP-licensed .cn subdomain set up for it. Behind a China CDN alone, every hero image and product video is a cross-border request to a CDN that doesn’t serve China. The page shell loads. The pictures don’t.

The Adobe tag stack. Launch (now Tags), Analytics and Target are scripts the visitor’s browser loads from outside China. Adobe’s own documentation is candid about it: Target “currently lacks an Edge Cluster in China,” Analytics has a Beijing collection endpoint only as a paid add-on that works with AppMeasurement and not the Web SDK, and Tags in China is a paid feature on a .cn domain. Blocked or slow tags mean your personalization doesn’t fire, your experiments don’t run, and your dashboards show a China audience that doesn’t exist, which usually gets read as “nobody in China visits us.”

Search, listings and commerce. Site search (Elasticsearch, Coveo, Algolia), product listings, real-time pricing, availability, a headless cart. Same pattern: a runtime call from the visitor’s browser to a service outside China. These are the requests your IT team will tell you must not be cached, and they’re right, which is exactly why a cache doesn’t help them.

Your forms. AEM Forms posts to AEM, so it follows whatever path your HTML takes. Eloqua, Marketo and HubSpot forms post to Eloqua, Marketo and HubSpot, all outside China, and none of them offers a China endpoint. If the browser can’t reach it, the form fails silently, and you find out when someone asks why China leads dried up.

Your video. YouTube and Vimeo are blocked outright, and there is no compliant way to unblock them. We don’t route around the Firewall, and neither should anyone you work with. That doesn’t mean you move off YouTube. Your team keeps publishing video exactly as it does today, and we enable the videos you control to work in mainland China, compliantly, with nothing changed on the global site. Dynamic Media video, Brightcove, Wistia and Vidyard are carried on the licensed path like everything else on the page.

Your other third-party scripts. Google Fonts, Google Maps, chat widgets, consent banners (OneTrust, TrustArc), RUM agents. Each one is a call from the browser to a server outside China. Some are blocked, some time out, and the page hangs while it waits. In the tests above, a single monitoring agent accounted for roughly a quarter of all requests on the page. This is what usually breaks a China site in practice. (For how far this reaches across a typical stack, we read 763 SaaS tools against China’s own rules.)

Your authors. Adobe’s own line is that “authoring content from China is possible with limitations and not fully supported by Adobe.” Your China content team logs in to the AEM author instance, which isn’t reliably reachable from inside China. The usual advice is a VPN. We don’t recommend that, and we’d be careful about any vendor who puts it in writing. We give authors a managed, licensed connection instead. No VPN, no China IT team pulled into it.

Your personal data. You’ll be told that personal data “must stay in China.” That’s one option, and the heaviest one. China’s privacy law (PIPL) regulates the cross-border transfer of personal information; it doesn’t ban it. For a marketing site with modest form volumes, nothing is usually required. As volumes grow, there’s a filing route with the regulator (the CAC) that lets you keep sending leads to your global CRM. Forced localization is for when volume, sensitivity or your own risk appetite calls for it. We help you pick the lighter one that still complies, and we set up localization when that’s the right call.

China CDN vs Adobe-hosted in China vs delivery layer, side by side

Here’s how we’d sort it. Be honest about which column your site is in.

If your China site is a handful of static pages and nothing on it talks to a server, a China CDN behind a proper ICP is a reasonable place to start, and some AEM sites have run that way for years. If your own internal policy says the servers must sit in China, Adobe-hosted is the right call. In both cases, budget for everything below the waterline separately, because neither includes it.

If your site uses Dynamic Media, runs the Adobe tag stack, has a form that matters, or needs search, pricing or a cart to work, the CDN will load the shell and the rest will fail. That’s most of the AEM sites we see, and the Optimizer is the fit. The same framework, for other stacks, is in How to Run SitecoreAI in China and Running an Optimizely Site in China.

Where to start

If China’s on the roadmap, or your China CDN just left the market, don’t start with a replacement line item. Start with two questions: do you have a Chinese entity, and does your site do anything at runtime that matters (Dynamic Media, Adobe tags, forms, search, pricing, video)? The answers decide the architecture, and the architecture decides the filing.

Wherever the answers leave you, there’s a fit. If your AEM site is mostly static and a China CDN is the right call, Managed China CDN (Managed China Edge Delivery) is that CDN tier run by us, with the ICP filed and maintained on your entity. If your site needs the whole page to work in China, the 21YunBox Optimizer is the licensed delivery layer described above, and a site that starts on the managed CDN can move up to it later without a rebuild. Either way, China compliance support comes with it: the entity and ICP work, annual renewals and audits, PIPL guidance on your forms and data, and managed, licensed access for your authors. One partner across every level, from “we have a China CDN and an ICP” to “every request on the page works in Shanghai.” For the ICP and data-residency specifics of running AEM in China, see our AEM China risk map and the AEM product page.

If you’d like a second opinion on where your site stands today, send us the URL and we’ll run the in-China assessment. No cost, no commitment, and you’ll get real numbers either way.

hello@21yunbox.com