We mapped 22,751 Chinese-language Telegram channels and the markets around them
A conservative review finds 2,281 public channels around seven marketplace and adjacent themes. They account for 10.0% of the Chinese-language channels in our semantic index and 18.6% of their subscriptions. The map shows public descriptions, not verified conduct.
Chinese-language Telegram is more than a chat community. Its public channels include news, entertainment, adult material and a set of markets that advertise services to one another. We examined the 22,751 Chinese-language channels in our semantic index, grouped their meanings into 80 smaller regions, then checked their public tags, titles and self-descriptions against seven narrowly defined themes.
2,281 channels match those rules: 10.0% of this slice of the index. Together they have 64.2m summed subscriptions, or 18.6%of the Chinese-language total. These are subscriptions across channels, not distinct people. The result is a conservative count of visible themes, not a count of criminal operators or transactions.
Seven public-facing themes
The categories below do not all imply wrongdoing. Regional exposure pages can be ordinary news publishers; currency exchange and recruitment can be lawful. We use “grey economy” for the cluster of marketplace language and adjacent information services we can observe, while leaving each channel's real-world activity unverified. Each channel appears in at most one row.
The largest selected group is betting and gambling. The 269 guarantee and escrow channels use marketplace terms such as 担保. The 299 account and number channels advertise identities, verification or access; the 162 materials channels use words such as 人设 and 话术 for persona images or chat scripts. Southeast Asian news and “exposure” channels are unusually large:403 channels account for 35.1m summed subscriptions.
We kept adult and escort material outside this thematic analysis. 7,610 Chinese-language index entries carry an adult or escort tag; none are used as examples here.
A shutdown visible from outside, with limits
Elliptic reported that Telegram deleted Huione Guarantee and Xinbi Guarantee channels and banned their usernames on May 13, 2025. Elliptic later tracked trade moving to other guarantee marketplaces; Recorded Future describes the public-channel infrastructure of one successor. Those investigations establish what happened to named marketplaces. Our index cannot establish whether any particular anonymous channel was part of them.
Channel IDs let us estimate creation periods for 22,086 Chinese-language channels.35.9% belong to blocks opened since May 2024 and 5.1% to blocks opened since May 2025. The selected set is 34.8% and 6.0% respectively. The strict classification therefore does not reproduce the pilot's claim that the whole segment is twice as young; individual themes differ. Persona materials are notably recent at 50.0% since May 2024.
| Measure | Selected themes | Other Chinese channels |
|---|---|---|
| Channels | 2,281 | 20,470 |
| Summed subscriptions | 64.2m | 280.8m |
| At least 10,000 subscribers | 828 | 4,536 |
| ID block opened since May 2024 | 34.8% | 36.0% |
| ID block opened since May 2025 | 6.0% | 5.1% |
| No post for over 180 days | 44.3% | 47.6% |
In the pre-May-2025 ID cohort, 35 selected channels and 324 other channels have their last known post in May 2025; the June counts are 36 and 215. A last-post date is not a deletion date. Deleted channels may have disappeared from our index altogether, and a surviving channel may simply have stopped posting. These counts cannot measure a ban wave or attribute silence to Telegram enforcement.
How we counted
- We took the 451,369-channel semantic index snapshot from October 10, 2026 and kept entries labelled Chinese (zh). The resulting 22,751 channels were clustered by their text embeddings into 80 Chinese-only subgroups. Subgroup numbers are unstable across runs.
- We inspected tags, titles and public self-descriptions, then applied explicit Chinese terms and tag combinations. The seven rules are mutually exclusive. Generic mentions in link lists were excluded where possible, and adult-tagged channels were removed first. Because the rules are deliberately narrow, this is a lower bound for these themes rather than a prevalence estimate for all illicit activity.
- We joined the same channel IDs to our local database for subscribers, peer IDs and last-post dates. “Born since May” means the Telegram ID lies in a block opened in that month; the ID yields an interval, not an exact creation day. The dating method and its uncertainty are described in our channel ID study.
- “Silent” means the last known post is over 180 days before that channel's latest analysis or check. This measure covers 18,156 channels with a known post date, not all 22,751. Observations in the underlying database span 2026-04-16 to 2026-10-03; an absent post or a stale observation does not prove inactivity today.
The index contains surviving public channels with enough text to embed. It misses closed, deleted, private and unindexed channels, and its language labels and theme rules can be wrong. None of our category counts should be read as a finding of illegality about an individual channel. For the broader Telegram population, see the channel census; to inspect the semantic landscape without a channel list, open the map.