Can foreign brands work with Douyin creators without a Chinese entity?

Xingtu is ByteDance's first-party creator marketplace: verified rate cards, audience demographics, campaign history, contracting and payment in one place. Registration gates on a Chinese business licence and real-name verification, which is a legal-entity requirement rather than a paperwork inconvenience — there is no overseas tier. The practical consequence is not that you cannot run Douyin campaigns; it is that you lose the verified data layer and have to rebuild it from public signals.

Direct contracting works when the creator publishes a business contact — many do, as a WeChat ID or a 商务合作 email in the bio. It is the cheapest route and the one where you keep full control of the brief, but payment and contracting across borders is on you. An MCN agency fronts the Xingtu relationship and handles both, at the cost of an opaque markup and a roster limited to creators they represent. A cross-border marketing agency sits in the middle: they act as the paying entity while you keep creator selection, which is usually the right trade when you have already built your own shortlist.

Without Xingtu's numbers, engagement computed from a creator's own recent videos is the honest substitute — and arguably the more useful one, since it reflects what the account does now rather than what a rate card claims. Rank candidates by median views and engagement rate over their last 20–30 posts, check posting cadence for signs of a dormant account, and read the comment section for whether the audience is actually Chinese-domestic. That gets you a defensible shortlist; audience demographics and a negotiated rate come later, in conversation with the creator or their agency.