@pipeworx/china-safe

China's official reserve assets, balance of payments, and external debt — 外汇储备 (FX reserves), 国际收支 (balance of payments), 外债 (external debt) — parsed from the English-language data pages of SAFE, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (国家外汇管理局).

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1683+ live data sources.

Tools

• china_fx_reserves({months}) — monthly official reserve assets: headline FX reserves (外汇储备), IMF reserve position, SDR holdings, gold (value + ounces), other reserve assets, and the total. MONTHLY, published roughly one week after month-end. Verified 2026-09-07: August 2026 was the newest month — FX reserves USD 3,438.325bn, total official reserve assets USD 3,854.885bn — published on 2026-09-07.
• china_balance_of_payments({quarters, currency}) — quarterly BOP summary: current account (goods, services, primary/secondary income), capital and financial account (incl. the reserve-assets change), and net errors and omissions. currency is usd (default), rmb, or sdr. QUARTERLY, with roughly a 3-month lag after quarter-end — this is the standard BPM6 release cadence, not a stale site. Verified 2026-09-07: latest quarter was 2026Q1, published 2026-06-26.
• china_external_debt({quarters}) — quarterly gross external debt position (外债) since 2014Q4: total, by original-contract maturity (short/long-term), and by institutional sector (general government, central bank, other depository corporations, other sectors, direct-investment intercompany lending). Same ~3-month quarterly lag as BOP. Verified 2026-09-07: latest quarter was 2026Q1, published 2026-06-26.
• china_safe_releases({limit}) — the REAL publish dates behind the other three tools, read from each source page's own PubDate metadata and its attached file's upload timestamp, not the page's permalink. Use this before citing a number from the other tools if freshness matters to the caller.

Auth

Keyless.

Data sources

• https://www.safe.gov.cn/en/ForexReserves/index.html — official reserve assets, one cumulative .xlsx per calendar year (columns YYYY.01–YYYY.12).
• https://www.safe.gov.cn/en/BalanceofPayments/index.html — one .xlsx with the full BOP time series in annual + quarterly sheets, each in RMB/USD/SDR.
• https://www.safe.gov.cn/en/ExternalDebt/index.html — one .xlsx with the gross external debt position by sector, quarterly since 2014Q4.

Traps recorded here so nobody re-discovers them

• The permalink URL is not the publish date. SAFE republishes each year's reserve table, and the BOP/debt time series, IN PLACE at a URL minted years earlier — e.g. "Official Reserve Assets (2026)" lives at /en/2021/0203/2045.html, a 2021-dated path, and was still updating live data as of 2026-09-07. Trust the article page's own <meta name="PubDate"> and the date embedded in the attached file's own path (/en/file/file/20260907/....xlsx), never the permalink.
• No JSON, no CSV, no rendered HTML table with the numbers in it. Each article page only links an .xlsx (and usually a matching .pdf); the page body is a stub. This pack parses the .xlsx directly with a hand-rolled, dependency-free ZIP+XML reader (src/xlsx.ts, ported from the ema-medicines pack's reader) — a Worker can't carry a full xlsx library for three files.
• The xlsx link's anchor text differs by page. Reserves pages link with plain anchor text (<a href="https://github.com/pipeworx-io/mcp-china-safe/blob/HEAD/...">xlsx</a>); BOP/external-debt pages put the full report title as the anchor text and the filename only in a title="..." attribute. Match on the .xlsx href extension, not the anchor text.
• Reserve rows are fixed by position, not by column header repetition. Each month is a pair of columns (USD, then SDR) but only the USD column carries the "YYYY.MM" header text — the SDR column is a merged cell with no header of its own. The six metric rows (FX reserves, IMF position, SDRs, gold value, gold ounces, other reserve assets, total) are at fixed row numbers within the sheet; verified against the live file before shipping (row totals reproduce column sums to the cent).
• BOP is a ~280-row BPM6 breakdown; this pack surfaces the 17 summary lines, not the full sub-account detail (financial-instrument-by-sector breakdowns run four levels deep). Row numbers are looked up dynamically by matching normalized column-A label text, not hardcoded, since the same template is reused across the RMB/USD/SDR sheets.
• External debt sector totals equal the sum of their own short+long-term subtotal rows, and the grand total equals the sum of the five sector totals — checked against the live 2026Q1 figures before shipping (24,120.799 = 3,601.510 + 1,034.221 + 9,886.860 + 6,820.844 + 2,777.364).
• Gold ounces are reported in units of 10,000 (万盎司) — e.g. "7673万盎司" is 76,730,000 ounces; this pack converts to gold_million_oz directly.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "china-safe": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/china-safe/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/china-safe/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1683+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/china_fx_reserves \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"months":3}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/china_fx_reserves. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Standalone (no gateway account)

This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "china-safe": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-china-safe"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-china-safe

It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about China Safe data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT