China — May to July 2017

[traveller 0]

I am planning a two to three month visit to China. I am interested in hearing any recent reports about using airvpn in China. Are there any difficulties, any suggestions, any advice? 

 

If anyone knows something that I should know, please let me know! If you know what I mean.

[LZ1 673]

Hello!
 

I'd say download Eddie before departure, use SSL/SSH and maybe even get Tor ready just in case. It does work in China, although it might be patchy. There are some China-related threads around here if you look .

[garmiste 2]

I'll second downloading BEFORE you leave. You also need to be ready to switch servers frequently. Don't think that because 2 - 3 servers don't connect or give you a painfully slow connection that Air doesn't work. The best server will often not be the one geographically closest to you. Be sure you're using an SSL or SSH connection. OpenVPN by itself will probably not work thanks to DPI. Also, the client software (Eddie) is fairly good at choosing a decent connection, but it's not perfect. Some servers will give you a better connection despite Eddie's choice, so experiment. I've used Air in the midwest as well as on the east coast and it seems pretty reliable.

[B3nB3n 4]

Sorry for warming up that topic.

Before I sucribe to airvpn, I wasn't want to be sure:

 

I have been to China countless times and used different VPNs (some worked, some not). In November I am going to life in China for several years, therefore I need a good and working VPN. Many people suggested airvpn and the more I read about it and here in the forum, the more I like it. So just to double check: the provided info in this thread is still up to date and working, isn't it?

 

maybe there is somebody in china at the moment and could confirme? Thanks everybody!

[serenacat 83]

Not trying to take any business from AirVPN, but as a "backup", forums in Australia have quite a few long term workers/visitors to China setting up a "private VPN", similar to a business running its own VPN server for remote access by staff to internal systems for security reasons.

See https://openvpn.net/

A moderate amount of motivation and technical expertise is required, and a suitable arrangement with family/friends/computershop/techo/? to host and run when/if needed. The Great Firewall seems to be rather "manual" and unpredictable and variable across time and location and how you are categorized - tourist, working for foreign corp, working for Chinese corp, foreign citizen visiting relatives, etc.

For some,  using a private vpn server and ip address back in one's "home country" allows access to georestricted streaming subscriptions etc in their own language. For the rest of us "commercial vpn users" it makes it more difficult for politicians and bureaucrats and police to argue for banning/blocking/registering vpn use to increase their power/budgets/kickbacks/... because this bypasses Netflix style filtering of ip address ranges and datacentre detection techniques.

[B3nB3n 4]

Thank you very much for the detailed information.

I have to check the private VPN idea.

Thank you.

 

And if anybody else has more information or different ideas, I am looking forward to it!

By the way: you didn't take business from AirVPN, I still consider buying it!

[B3nB3n 4]

Short experience report: VPN works with the given help perfectly. Thank you very much!