Yes. Salesforce has partnered with Alibaba Cloud to offer localized, cloud-based versions of its core products (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and the Salesforce Platform) hosted within mainland China. This managed SaaS offering is designed to meet China’s data residency and compliance requirements without the need for on-premise infrastructure or manual updates (Salesforce, Alibaba Cloud).

Salesforce CRM and Core Cloud Services are also not officially blocked in mainland China, and users within corporate networks can often access the dashboards. However, access speeds are generally slow, and some features may intermittently fail due to cross-border data transfer restrictions or reliance on resources hosted outside of China.

Salesforce-hosted websites (e.g., those built with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement) often perform poorly or fail to load entirely in mainland China unless specifically optimized. These pages rely heavily on external scripts, fonts, trackers, and non-China-licensed CDNs, which are subject to blocking, throttling, or significant latency under China’s internet regulations.

Salesforce global instances often depend on third-party resources and CDNs that perform poorly or are inaccessible in China. This causes incomplete page loads, timeouts, or broken site functionality (Salesforce Engineering).

Users accessing Salesforce sites hosted outside China often experience slow load times and limited functionality due to cross-border network constraints and the inaccessibility of key web resources.

Not necessarily. Chinafy can be layered onto your existing Salesforce stack to create a China-optimized version of your site in approximately two weeks, with no need to rebuild or rehost. For businesses opting into the Salesforce on Alibaba Cloud offering, additional localization steps may still apply, depending on setup and deployment goals.

Note: Some businesses may still require local hosting and an ICP license depending on their operations and business needs. For those, Chinafy can support onshore configurations. Always consult your legal/compliance team as needed. 

Only if your site is hosted in mainland China or uses a China-based CDN. ICP licensing and a China business entity is a regulatory requirement for any site that uses mainland-hosted infrastructure, regardless of the underlying CMS or platform.

Read more | What is an ICP license?

If you are transferring Chinese personal information outside of China, the Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) applies extraterritorially to any foreign company, such as when Chinese leads enter a global CRM. Collecting data for cross-border data transfer requires specific consent and, when you exceed ~1 million records or handle sensitive data, may require a security assessment, data localization or regulator-approved transfer mechanisms.

Read more | Navigating China's PIPL

A China CDN can improve asset delivery speed, but it doesn't resolve issues tied to third-party resources or front-end dependencies. Often the main reasons Salesforce pages load slowly in China. Chinafy complements CDNs by optimizing these critical elements.

Read more | チャイナフィ対CDN

You can test your site's performance using Chinafy’s グローバル・スピード・テスト または ビジュアル・スピード・テスト to compare load times, TTFB and third-party resources inside vs. outside China.

Read more | How does Chinafy work?

- Combines both in-person and platform-level features to detect and replace blocked or slow resources that cause loading delays.

- If you're hosting offshore, Chinafy routes China-IP-based traffic to the China-optimized version of your site. If you're already hosting onshore, all your traffic will see the optimized version for China visitors.

- Chinafy then keeps your China-optimized site in sync with your global one, so any content changes are reflected accordingly.

Read more | How does Chinafy work?