Copyright Law, Article 5(2) and Article 24(2)-(4) (facts exclusion and news-reporting exceptions)

Article 5(2) excludes 单纯事实消息 (unofficial rendering: "the news of the day", i.e. pure factual news reports) from copyright protection outright, so a bare news item is never a protected work under Chinese law whichever outlet reports it first.

Article 24 separately sets a closed list of uses that need neither the copyright holder's consent nor payment provided the author and title are credited and the use does not unreasonably prejudice the copyright holder: item (2) permits appropriately quoting a published work in another work to introduce, comment on, or explain it; item (3) permits unavoidably reproducing or quoting an already-published work when reporting news in a newspaper, periodical, radio, or television broadcast; and item (4) permits a newspaper, periodical, radio station, or television station to reprint or broadcast another such outlet's already-published current-affairs article on political, economic, or religious questions, unless the copyright holder has declared reprinting or broadcasting impermissible.

None of these exceptions is capped at a headline-length or short-extract threshold, and no reported Chinese court decision applies them to a systematic news aggregator's reproduction of headlines and snippets as opposed to conventional news reporting or quotation.