VPNs in China
Before moving to China I wish I’d asked these three questions.
Do you need a VPN in China? Yes.
Can you buy one from China? Maybe.
If you plan to continue the life you took for granted in the West without a VPN will you have trouble? Indubitably.
Wired coined the term “Great Firewall” for China’s digital domain spanning censorship network. It’s historical, punny, and political, and so an almost too-perfect name.
Not so perfect is the fact that the Great Firewall is very real, and a bit scary. There’s good stories for the sobering facts to be found, like this one from the Atlantic or this one from the Financial Times. But for the purposes of understanding the deal you get with a VPN, the estimated bill for constructing and maintaining the Great Firewall was $770 million USD, and that’s back in 2002.
So my $8 USD a month for my grappling hook over the wall is a great deal from the wider perspective. But when YouTube is slow to load, or I hit my accounts device limit, you’d better believe my provider gets called every dirty name under the sun. Because a VPN doesn’t act like a grappling hook, a thin but reliable lifeline, instead it’s a magical wardrobe through the Great Firewall into the free internet realm. So it’s all or nothing, and nothing can be mighty frustrating.
The Firewall does not block everything of course, so when I said it’s all or nothing just before that was a total lie. Many technology blogs or news sites are reachable, and you can, in fact, read much worldly criticism of ‘China’s Intranet’ from within the network. What you can’t do is tweet Donald Trump, or send your cousin a birthday message on Facebook. What you care about not being able to do will, of course, depend on you. Use this handy tool to see whether your daily habits as a netizen are simpatico with the ‘moral dangers’ facing China.
If you’re like me and value instant messaging gabfests and late-night video game tournament coverage then you will be needing to enter into territory decreed forbidden. You don’t necessarily need a VPN, however. There’s one alternative I had recommended to me from the Shenzhen expat group on Facebook, and that is Epic Privacy Browser.
Through some voodoo magic, this browser will give you access just like you’re back home. It’s free, it’s based on Chromium so it looks and acts like Chrome, and those are two great things. If I’d known about this at the start of my China stint I may have gone VPN-less, or at least tried that existence out. The shortcomings are all based on the very fact it’s a browser, and so not creating an unblocked connection across your system. Dedicated chat apps won’t work, Skype or Google Hangouts, and maybe baselessly I’m a little weird about saving all my passwords and doing all my browsing on a third-party browser. But if you’re already in-country, missed your expiry date, or having trouble getting money or favours overseas, this is a nice linchpin. Oh, and it’s a browser, as mentioned, and doesn’t have mobile versions available, so you better brush up on your Mandarin street names for Baidu Maps on-the-go.
But if you want to get on the wider web on a mobile device, gaming console, or anything but a browser, you’ll be needing a VPN. A quick note about the process of acquiring of VPN service, it’s similar to the acquisition of many other products and services in its requirement of currency in exchange. That exchange can be difficult if you are already in China, as the RMB is a semi-convertible currency, which is just one reason paying for goods and services online can be at times impossible. If you don’t have a foreign credit card, a stockpile of favours from someone who does, or a Chinese friend with a rare Amex/Mastercard/Visa from a domestic bank, well then I hope you have some Bitcoin in a sock drawer. More and more VPN’s have begun to accept Bitcoin, and you can buy BC quite easily or so I’ve been told. Spare yourself some hassle though and get your VPN account secured and your software clients installed before coming over.
I’ll now briefly lay out some VPN options.
— ExpressVPN
This provider came to my attention through a strong recommendation. In response to a questionnaire about VPN’s one user of ExpressVPN told me they’d used several other providers, but were very happy with this choice. Customer service was apparently excellent, and they were getting speeds comparable with what they also get in the Netherlands. They pay $12.95 USD per month for 4 active devices.
— StrongVPN
A respondent named Michael Archer recommends this service, as have some colleagues of mine. In terms of cost, two active devices can be had for only $42 USD a year, so that works out to be one of the cheapest offerings I’ve seen.
— VPN.ac
If it hadn’t been named in a questionnaire response I likely would never have found this service. There is quite a deep sea of VPN providers, and with a couple innocent typos on the homepage and simple design I might have glossed over this one. However, it was named, and the price of $4.90 a month for 3 active devices, along with the ability to pay via Bitcoin, stood out. Worth a look to the right person.
— Astrill
My personal VPN choice. I became a customer not through research or conscious decision after studying the market, but by default from being able to piggyback an existing account upon arrival. The internet is a series of tubes it’s true, and it can be a complicated series indeed, so I’m never sure when I’m having difficulties quite who to blame. But quite honestly the research done for this piece has made me much more forgiving towards my own provider, however, maligned they may be in my house on a day of occasional dropouts. With 5 devices concurrent, but more than that jockeying for a slot the service works surprisingly well, and all in all I’d say it has my recommendation (referral link).
To be frank, were I to be back home, on the other side of the Great Firewall I would not be rushing out to pay for and use a VPN service. Safer browsing and a healthy bit of anonymization is good for the herd, but it’s not really a worthwhile trade-off for me. They can be aggravating, clunky, and at the mercy of DDoS and other cyber-attack, but at their best a VPN will open the wardrobe door to internet Narnia.
If you’re moving to the gold fields of the world’s biggest and yet still developing economy, and you doubt that you really need your Facebook stalking or Netflix fix, think twice before getting on the plane. If you’ve grown up with the free internet, you may not realize how much you’ll miss it till it’s gone. It’s a lot like the blue sky.
