ITT: lots of generic VPN advice by people who have no experience with the specific problem.
this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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It's better to pay for a VPN provider that is verified to work in China. And no, they won't kidnap you for using a VPN as some people write here. It's a non-issue just to bypass the GFW. The issue is when you write to a Chinese audience things that the CCP do not like.
They are prepared for such ideas, and you should assume that they are better than you.
And there are hundreds if not thousands of them, plus a lot of automated tooling.
And of course, they control the hardware and software. I wouldnt risk it as a foreign national who has occasionally done work in the defense industry, but everyone has a different risk tolerance.
It's possible for a while but there is a whack-a-mole game if you're doing anything they would care about. So you will have to keep moving it around. VPS forums will have some info.
It will work for a bit, then they will detect VPN traffic and just block the destination ip for good. Any ip you will use will be shortly unreachable for you, so be prepared to that.
How will they detect "VPN traffic"?
Deep level packet inspection, they detect patterns or whatever in encrypted traffic (and the lack of thereof) and ban the destination ip china-wide.
How they do I have no idea, but they do, on my direct first hand experience. Its not based on domain names, directly straight and total ip ban. All ports, all domains on that ip get banned forever just because you started using a VPN (OpenVPN in my case, it was a few years ago).
Yes. China's great firewall mostly handles content filtering and deals with low hanging fruit. Getting around it is fairly simple, and the censorship is mostly focused on stuff that would otherwise be easily accessible by the broader population.
VPN is your obvious choice here. CCP blocks most public VPN providers, so you'd have to roll your own.
You can set up a VPN concentrator somewhere in the world, and you would be able to reach it. As far as I've noticed, they don't block VPN as a whole, and default port should work fine - the reason for this is probably that VPN has many commercial uses that they don't want to harm.
Source: I run a (work-related) VPN accessible from inside china.
You don't have to set up your own VPN. Many public providers work.
This is bad information. You do not need to roll your own VPN.
I have a private vpn in korea, i could connect to that vpn even through china's hotel wifi
Could browse as per normal with abysmal internet speed
Could browse as per normal with abysmal internet speed
Of course. It's because they had to catch and write down every single byte with a pencil on paper, then decrypt it, understand it, report the funny ones to a boss, who nodded slowly and silently and then they typed it in again on the other side.
/s
It's getting a little better now because they can just scan in what they wrote and OCR it
China blocks most IPs from foreign cloud providers like AWS or Digital Ocean. And if I am not mistaken, they can also block some VPN protocols (tor is not a VPN protocol, but it is very blocked, I don't know if tor bridge works), but I am not sure which exactly.
Do mainstream VPN providers not have a Chinese solution?
They have. I don't know what people are talking about in this post. It's bypassable easily, and the CCP won't kill you for it. There are so many Chinese using aVPN themselves to bypass GFW
What brand of VPN do you use to bypass it, many of my friends are there quite frequently, none of them have a mainstream solution for it.
Unfortunately it's still trial and error. Check out e.g Ovpn, Astrill, Mullvad though. You can always email and ask different providers as well. Though it's best it you set it up before visiting China. A HK sim through Airalo or similar also works.
Last time I was there, express does not work, and I heard proton also does not work. However, my mobile carrier by default routes all roaming traffic through UK, so that did work.
I don't know if it will work, but it's possible to tunnel all your traffic through a VPS using SSH and a piece of software called sshuttle.
You can tunnel over SSL with stunnel. TCP latency can be brutal though.
You want to look into v2ray for self hosting. For example with https://github.com/hiddify/Hiddify-Manager
Yeah, you can look up how to setup hysteria2 and xray. Additionally you need to understand that firewall is different in different places, in some places like big cities you can even use plain openvpn (during daytime), in other more rural places almost everything is blocked.
Yeah, I've heard Shanghai for example has zones where the GFW is much more lax?
Depends - how many family members do you have that the PRC might use against you? or who would miss you if the PRC black bagged you?
VPN's aren't illegal in china, and they don't go about random people who use them. Unless you are very vocal and high profile person no one will black bag you in a country of billion people, lol.
VPNs as a technology might not be illegal but circumventing the firewall certainly is.
Unless you are very vocal and high profile person no one will black bag you in a country of billion people, lol.
This is a bit of a misunderstanding about how things work in an authoritarian system. Sure, you might fly under the radar for awhile, but if you call attention to yourself (say, by getting caught trying to bypass the government firewall) and you are not high-profile, then it is very low-effort to make you disappear. Few will notice, and those that do will stay silent out of fear.
If you are more high-profile you still get black-bagged, you just get released after, with your behavior suitably modified.
Naomi Wu no longer uploads to YouTube.
Ffs you do not get disappeared for using vpns especially personal ones. You can install vpns that circumvent firewalls as long as they are blessed by ccp and they are sold using wechat. For non compliant ones it's the same. It's you who misunderstands how authoritarian systems work, noone tries to nail you for doing something semi-illegal, you will be dissapeared for non-conforming not for exploiting system.
Tap for spoiler
I work in the vpn industry and we had multiple consultations and tests done in china.
The keyboard apps are backdoored.
It's crazy that this is an opinion that people really have. I don't like authoritarian states and I have a lot of issues with the CCP, but this isn't true at all. Loads of native Chinese living in China uses a VPN. They don't care about it.
Social Credit --;
Yeah. But it kinda defeats the purpose.
The whole point of a VPN is to mix your traffic with tons of other people's traffic
Where in the world did you get that idea?
VPNs serve three functions:
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add a layer of encryption so your local network operator and ISP can't inspect your traffic, its contents and its true destination. (this is what OP is looking for)
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make it appear to the service you are connecting to, that you are connecting from a different location than where you actually are. (for example make Netflix think you're in a different region to show you different content)
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provide secure access to private services that are not exposed directly to the Internet. IE securely connecting devices on seprate LAN networks together over the Internet via an encrypted tunnel. This is a VPNs true purpose and how they are primarily used in Professional/Comercial settings. (pretty much every corporation you've ever interacted with runs a VPN that connects its stores/warehouses/offices together)
These are the true points, however the 4th reason to use a VPN is if you are using a fingerprint-resistant browser and lots of other people are too, it's harder to track who is going where, since the exit IP is shared.
If tor isn't working for whatever reason
Not really, you need a license and you can host openvpn at tcp 443, but chances are they'll try to track you down and make your life unpleasant.
When I was there I vps bumped through Hk, that's probably harder now.
Only if you want a visit from the thought police.
They do not visit you. You do not visit them. You visit bad places.
You do visit them. Its a tea chat