Q: Are there free Chinese corpus resources?
A: Yes. There are a number of freely avail Chinese and E-C parallel corpora publicly available. Most of them can be concordanced online. Only a few can be downloaded to your own machine.

Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese
http://www./SinicaCorpus/

Peking University Modern Chinese Corpus
http://ccl.pku.edu.cn/ccl_corpus/xiandaihanyu/

Xiamen University Chinese corpus (registration required but free)
http:///gb/hanyu/hanyu/data/corpus/index.htm

Xiamen University E-C parallel corpus (registration required but free)
http:///gb/hanyu/hanyu/data/ec-corpus/logon1.asp

Beijing Language and Culture University corpus
http://202.112.195.8:8089/ccir_login?input=*

Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese
http://bowland-files./corplang/cgi-bin/conc.pl

Leeds Chinese corpus
http://corpus./query-zh.html

PFR People's Daily corpus (01/1998)
http://bowland-files./corplang/pdcorpus/pdcorpus.htm

PH corpus (Xinhua newswire data 1990-1991)
http://bowland-files./corplang/phcorpus/phcorpus.htm

People's Daily 2000 corpus
http://bowland-files./corplang/pdc2000/default.htm

Peking University Ancient Chinese Corpus
http://ccl.pku.edu.cn/ccl_corpus/jsearch/index.jsp?dir=gudai

Peking University E-C parallel corpus (not working online?)
http://www.icl.pku.edu.cn/icl_groups/parallel/concordance.asp

Sinica corpus of early Chinese
http://www./Early_Mandarin/

Sheffield Corpus of Chinese for Diachronic Linguistic Study
http://www./scc/