Greater China — Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau — indexes 334 providers and 463 APIs at apis.io/regions/greater-china/. The concentration is in mobile-first commerce, super-app integration stacks, and a fast-growing AI and ML infrastructure layer.
At 1.4 APIs per provider it is one of the shallowest ratios on the network, and the contrast with Latin America is instructive.
The leaders
| Provider | Score | Band | APIs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Xiaoman | 61.2 | Strong | 7 |
| ColorfulClouds | 56.7 | Developing | 6 |
| LianLian Global | 55.9 | Developing | 47 |
| Xiaomi | 52.7 | Developing | 8 |
| University of Hong Kong | 51.3 | Developing | 12 |
| Harbin Institute of Technology | 49.7 | Developing | 3 |
| China Mobile | 49.3 | Developing | 6 |
| 49.3 | Developing | 16 | |
| Crescendo Lab | 48.4 | Developing | 4 |
| City University of Hong Kong | 47.4 | Developing | 35 |
| Kimi (Moonshot) | 46.7 | Developing | 13 |
| Hong Kong Baptist University | 46.2 | Developing | 34 |
One strong-band provider. No exemplars. The regional ceiling is 61.2.
The universities are the surprise
Four of the top twelve are academic institutions — HKU, CityU, Hong Kong Baptist, and Harbin Institute of Technology — and CityU (35 APIs) and HKBU (34) publish larger surfaces than almost every commercial provider in the region except LianLian.
Hong Kong’s universities operate under open-data and research-transparency expectations that mainland commercial platforms do not share, and the result is that academia is carrying a disproportionate share of the region’s public API surface.
Why the commercial ratio is low
The super-app model is the explanation. In markets where WeChat and Alipay mediate commerce, messaging, identity, and payment simultaneously, integration happens inside those platforms — through mini-programs and platform-specific SDKs — rather than across open HTTP APIs between independent services.
WeChat’s own entry shows it: 16 APIs, a 49.3 developing score, for a platform with over a billion users. That is not the surface of a company whose integration story is the public API; it is the surface of a company whose integration story is “build inside our walls.”
Compare Latin America, covered this week: 383 providers, 1,109 APIs, eight providers at strong or better, led by an exemplar. LATAM’s fragmentation forced open interoperability. Greater China’s consolidation removed the need for it.
Where the growth is
Kimi (Moonshot) at 46.7 on 13 APIs is the AI-infrastructure signal. That cohort is young, and it is the one segment where Chinese providers are publishing conventional, openly-consumable REST surfaces — because the customers are developers who expect an OpenAI-shaped API.
Takeaway
334 providers, 463 APIs, no exemplars, and universities out-publishing most commercial platforms. Greater China’s low API density is not an engineering gap — it is the predictable result of super-apps making external interoperability unnecessary.
Browse the region at apis.io/regions/greater-china/.