Europe’s adaptTo() 2025 conference really put a spotlight on a topic many global site owners overlook: the China web performance problem.

We presented a solution at this year's conference on AEM & Edge Delivery Performance in China (full video forthcoming shortly!). In this session (which we'll post shortly once available) Tad Reeves from Arbory Digital and Kamil Chociej from StreamX examined why web performance in mainland China is so generally abysmal, why it should matter to you, and how we've engineered a solution to make Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and Edge Delivery Services (EDS) work reliably behind the Great Firewall.

It's a solution that we'd love to show you - as, if you've got a website that caters to a global audience, and if you haven't done something concentrated & effective about your web performance in China, it's almost a certainty that it's entirely unacceptable.

Why China Matters

China has 1.2 billion internet users, more than India, the US, and Brazil combined. It is the largest consumer goods market in the world, and online decisions drive that buying power.

If your global site is not pulling meaningful traffic from China, it is not a translation issue. It is a performance issue. And the problem is structural. Simply translating content isn’t enough; the real issues are technical, and they’re stopping you from tapping into an enormous audience.

What Makes Web Performance in China So Challenging?

Delivering digital experiences into China is unlike any other region. Companies face hurdles that simply do not exist elsewhere:

• The Great Firewall slows or blocks traffic with DNS poisoning, IP blocking, and deep packet inspection. Performance is inconsistent and unpredictable.
• ICP Licensing is mandatory for hosting, and even stricter for video.
• No global CDN POPs exist inside China (Fastly, Cloudflare, Akamai all stop at Hong Kong or Tokyo).
• AEM gaps: AEMaaCS is not available in China. AEM 6.5 exists, but requires a completely separate environment and pipeline.
• EDS limits: Cloudflare and Fastly based delivery stop at the firewall.

The result is stark. For many companies, a page that loads in 1.5 seconds in the US can take 150 seconds or more in China and sometimes never loads at all.

Our own website here, running on Edge Delivery Services without any action taken to optimize for the in-China user population, does not have acceptable performance at all.

The Wrong Answers (and Why They Do Not Work)

Teams often try fixes, but each comes with painful trade-offs:

• Run a duplicate AEM 6.5 site in China. This doubles your infrastructure and pipeline.
• Push a static site into China. This removes personalization and interactivity.
• Use local CDNs like Tencent or Baidu. Cache invalidation is complex, and dynamic content still struggles.
• Disable features. Users lose the experience that makes your brand unique.

You do not need a watered-down site in China. You need your actual site working at speed.

Guiding Principles for a Better Approach

We distilled two guiding principles for any viable solution:

• Data traversing the Great Firewall will always be unreliable. Performance may improve with tuning, but cross‑border hops will never match domestic speeds.
• Chinese users should never have to fetch data from outside the firewall. Serving content locally is the only way to guarantee consistent load times.

Introducing DX Mesh: Turning Caching on Its Head

To solve the China problem without sacrificing the flexibility of AEM or the simplicity of EDS, we developed DX Mesh. Rather than rely on caching layers at the edge, DX Mesh pushes content and code to a lightweight system hosted inside China. The core ideas include:

• Reversing the cache model. Instead of waiting for Chinese users to request content across the Great Firewall, DX Mesh proactively replicates and processes content in mainland clusters.
• Dynamic, flexible pipelines. A service‑mesh architecture ingests content from various sources (GitHub repositories, AEM authoring tools, Adobe’s Universal Editor, Google Docs, etc.) and processes it through a series of micro‑services. Those services produce optimized web resources, pages, and dependencies that are stored within China clusters.
• Mesh of clusters. The architecture contains three cluster types: a pilot cluster (control plane) that defines projects and deployments, a processing cluster (data plane) that receives content from AEM/EDS/Magento and prepares it, and multiple edge clusters distributed globally, including at least one in mainland China. Edge clusters serve processed content directly to local users, ensuring that Chinese requests never cross the firewall.

A simplified version of the service mesh flows like this:

1. Content sources publish changes (e.g., by saving documents or triggering AEM publish actions). These changes are forwarded to GitHub.
2. GitHub connectors relay those changes to the processing cluster.
3. The processing cluster runs a pipeline of services, index fetchers, dependency rewriters, page relays, and sitemap generators that produce optimized assets.
4. Edge clusters in various regions pull the processed assets. Users in the US, Europe, and China request content from their nearest edge node; Chinese users fetch from the in‑China cluster, completely avoiding the Great Firewall.

This design requires upfront work defining the service mesh, provisioning clusters, and managing licenses, but it enables a unified codebase and CI/CD pipeline while delivering near‑native performance for Chinese users.

Why This Matters for You

China performance is not optional. With a billion users online, it is a business growth imperative.

DX Mesh makes AEM and EDS work in China without hacks, workarounds, or compromises.

If you care about your brand’s global reach, this is the missing piece.

We would love to show you how it works. Contact us to see this solution in action and learn how your site can achieve not just "acceptable" performance in China, but absolutely BLISTERINGLY FAST performance, even with a complicated backend.

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