VPN is a necessary tool for many people, especially for travelers who need to use it to access blocked content or geographical limited content on the internet, or anyone who need to protect their private information from stolen when connecting their smartphones or laptops to public WiFi in a hotel or coffee shop.
If you have ever visited China, then you might have already experienced, your VPN cannot work in China, or you can’t even access the websites for downloading VPN. If you have not visited China before, then you probably have heard about this issue. This article will introduce the way to make VPN work in China and how to download VPN if you are in China.
First assume you have a VPN installed on your device, if you don’t have, jump to this part of article to learn how to download VPN in China.
So how to make your VPN work in China?
If you find the VPN you use can’t work China, then there’s literally nothing you can do to make your VPN work, since the problem is not out of settings or the related things of your VPN, but it’s been blocked or cracked down by China, to solve the problem, you have to get another VPN service. So how to get a reliable VPN that can work in China?
Let’s first briefly talk about China’s blocking of VPN.
How can VPN be blocked and why? China has strict internet censorship, the authority has blocked many foreign websites containing the content that’s considered by the authority as harmful for its citizen. But VPN allows citizen in the country to bypass the block and access unfiltered web, this matter caught the authority’s attention. To make the citizen’s circumvent measure unable to work, the Great Firewall(the same filtering system that being used to block foreign websites), is upgraded and started being used to block VPN traffic a few years ago.
In the beginning years, only a handful of VPNs were affected by the blocking, but since 2017, Chinese authorities deepened crackdown on VPN, many VPNs were blocked and started not working to access blocked websites, the affected VPNs include some well-known VPN providers like Astrill. These blocked VPNs rely on some popular VPN protocols that use specific ports, which are specifically being used for VPN, Great Firewall is able to use deep packet inspection and machine learning to identify this kind of VPN traffic and block them.
In the same time, many VPN providers have invented some methods to defeat the blocking, their technology can disguise the VPN traffic to look like normal internet traffic, avoiding the detection by Great Firewall.
As of 2018, the VPNs listed below can still be used fine in China:
ExpressVPN, NordVPN, VyprVPN, PureVPN.
Choose best server location
VPN providers usually offer a lot of VPN server locations, for best performance, it’s better to connect to servers located in Asia or the West Coast of America, because the connection speed is affected by the distance between the client and server, the above mentioned locations are closer to China, your VPN will be faster when connecting to servers in these locations.
How to download VPN in China
Although there are still many VPNs can help internet users in China access blocked websites, these VPNs’ websites are all blocked in China like those popular foreign sites. For this reason it’s hard for Chinese citizens to find these VPNs and sign up their service, so it’s highly recommended to sign up a VPN service and download the app before your arrival in China,
If you are already in China and have no VPN installed on your device, you can consider to use VyprVPN, it has a mirror website that is not blocked.
And below is the other useful method to access a VPN websites in China.
Using Shadowsocks
Aside from using VPN, many internet users in China are using another tool to circumvent the Great Firewall’s block. The tool is called Shadowsocks, it’s a special proxy software that uses socks5 protocol, which makes users’ rerouted traffic look like normal internet traffic, hence harder for Great Firewall’s deep-packet-inspection to block.
The use of Shadowsocks is like operating a VPN that is set up and owned by yourself, to use it you need to rent a VPS, and set up Shadowsocks on the server, then download a client app of Shadowsocks to start using it. Here is the detailed guide to using Shadowsocks.
The VPS can be rent for just an hour, which will cost only a cent. Before you stop using it, you can set up Shadowsocks on it, and download a Shadowsocks client so that you will be able to access the blocked VPN sites and sign up a VPN service. However, Shadowsocks is also a reliable tool for bypassing Great Firewall’s block, you can continue to use Shadowsocks instead of VPN.