- Spoiler alert, there is no best VPN for China
and every other video you watch that says otherwise
I can almost guarantee you
that that person has never lived in China.
If you'll trust me with just a few minutes of your time
I promise you the stories and strategies
I'm about to share with you
will change the way you view both the internet
and VPNs in China.
My name's Josh and ever since
I first moved to China in 2006,
I've been using VPNs to stream my favorite shows,
access the news and generally evade the censorship.
It's affectionately known by expats
as the great firewall of China.
My goal here isn't to just share with you a list of VPNs,
make an affiliate commission, then be on my way.
I wanna help educate you on how censorship in China works,
answer whether or not it's legal to use a VPN in China
and then explain my strategy
that has allowed me to successfully connect to a VPN
for years in China.
Let's begin with a quick history of censorship here.
It wasn't until the early 2000s
that China's Ministry of Information
began to censor the internet.
It officially began in late 2006
when China started its Golden Shield Project
which is now known as the Great Firewall.
It was barely noticeable at first,
mainly just porn websites
and a few blatant anti-Chinese websites.
But then 2009 the flood gates opened
or rather they close tightly.
YouTube was blocked in March, followed by Facebook,
Twitter and others in July.
From 2009 on censorship in China became so widespread
that the question changed from
what is blocked in China to what isn't blocked to China?
China says they do this
for the protection of their population
and in some cases I can see the merits of this argument
but the fact is
is that VPNs are extremely popular among Chinese people.
It's the government's way of controlling
the flow of information
and before you jump on your soapbox
about authoritarian communist governments
and I admit I'm guilty of that as well.
Take a look at how your own government
is starting to quietly censor the internet,
you might be surprised.
So with this in mind, the most common question I'd get
about VPNs in China is this,
is it legal to use a VPN in China?
I'll answer this question
with a story from my own experience.
A few years ago while I lived
in the sensitive Western region of Xinjiang,
my phone that I'd been using for quite some time
it just stopped working.
I tried topping it up, restarting it,
whatever it was just no longer working.
So I took it into China, UNICOM, my cellular provider
and I was shocked when they told me
that my service had been cut by the local authorities
and that I would need to visit the police station
to get me started.
But when I got to the station
they actually went through my phone,
deleted all of my VPNs
and also other apps like Skype, Viber, Signal and others.
After they were done my phone service was reactivated
but as a test,
when I left the station I immediately
re-installed all of those apps
to see if my service would be cut again,
well, it never was.
I tell you this story,
basically as a worst case scenario,
I've never heard of a foreigner getting seriously punished
for using a VPN service.
Although with China,
anything is possible in the future, I realized that.
I can't say with certainty
whether it's illegal to use a VPN in China
because China's laws and policies are purposefully vague.
If China doesn't like you
they will find a way to nail you for something.
But if you just wanna use a VPN to access your email,
watch YouTube, stream Netflix,
countless expats in China
will tell you the same exact thing, you're gonna be fine.
Okay, now let's jump into some practical advice here,
what is the best VPN for China?
The answer is simple yet vague, it depends.
You see, we all tend to think that China's internet
runs into the single choke point
in Beijing where the authorities decide
what is or isn't blocked.
But this isn't true,
China's internet is actually censored on a local
and enterprise level with Beijing
sending directives on what should be blocked.
It's up to the Chinese social media companies
to censor themselves
and local governments and cities across China
to follow these directives from Beijing
and they sometimes put additional censorship in place
just for good measure.
Again, I've had the experience of traveling between cities
where an app on my phone was working in one place
and then all of a sudden it stopped working in another city.
The local government in one city had decided
that this communications app should be blocked
when the other city hadn't.
This is incredibly important to understand
when it comes to VPNs in China
because what works in one place in the country
might not work in another.
I've had people tell me that such and such VPN
works really well in Shanghai
but when I download and try it and Shindong,
I just could never connect.
So if you wanna connect to a VPN in China,
here's my three-step strategy that I use
and recommend to others.
First, I download multiple VPN services
that all offer 30 day money-back guarantees.
Here's a list of my favorite
and if you'd like to help support this channel
please use the affiliate links in the description below.
Each of these VPNs has historically worked well in China.
They fought through a number of VPN crackdowns
over the past decade and at least in my experience
they have good customer support.
Second, once you're settled in China,
spend a couple of weeks testing each VPN
on different devices.
You'll find that some probably connect easier than others
and some have better speeds.
The last thing you do is keep the one or two
that you like most and get refunds on the rest.
I tend to keep at least two active VPN accounts
while I'm in China because
there are times when one experiences a crackdown
and I still need consistent access to the open internet.
I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that one VPN
is always the best in China
because as I've already said,
that's never been my experience,
I think most foreigners here would agree.
Ask some other foreigners
in the area where you'll live in China what they use,
try a number of different services
and find out what works best for you.
And if at all possible download and sign up for these VPNs
before you leave for China
because I can tell you from experience
that it's quite hard to do so once you're here in China.
'Cause as you might expect,
China's sensors VPN websites too.
What's been your experience so far?
I answer all questions in the comments as best as I can
so I encourage you to leave yours now,
use the links in the description
and please give this video a thumbs up if it's been helpful.