VPN for China: Breaking the Great Firewall of China

Everything You Need To Know About Best VPN for China

Many Chinese users face punishments for breaking the laws. In this instance, using and accessing the global internet is not allowed in China as the internet is tightly regulated by the Chinese government. After VPNs became famous all over the world, china also saw many citizen drifting towards it. After several incident that occurred in China were exposed thanks to VPNs and global internet, people started to question the government. This is when the government started monitoring the internet all over the country. Now, VPN for China are not allowed to operate in chinese territory simply because they cannot access it. The firewall which protects the Chinese internet is known as the “Great Firewall of China”. In this article, we look into how users can access Chinese servers or access global internet from China. 

First things first, VPN for China hasn’t totally banned simply because it’s not possible for the government to ban it on full scale. After the rules got stricter in 2017, the ISPs were given more control over the internet they provide. Now users must provide full name for registration against their IPs. Coming back to the government, they also has a lot of use for VPNs simply because, they need it for privacy and security reasons. So to clear the misconception, the VPNs are not banned on full scale rather the government decided it make it licensed in order to better regulate it. So the people can also use VPNs however, they must be licensed to operate in China. The punishment for using or selling unlicensed VPN can result from a fine to imprisonment. Therefore, it is better for the users to only find licensed VPN for China. Since china’s domestic network is tightly controlled, you need a VPN that can successfully surpass its firewall. Most of the travelers and expats in China use VPNs in order to stay connected from the rest of the world. Since there is no other way, a VPN might come in handy if you want to access the global social media apps (since our lives revolve around it).

Best VPNs for China

Our list of best VPNs for China are based on few criteria such as

Ability to Bypass The Great Firewall

 This is ofcourse, the primary criteria. As China’s censorship is the biggest and strongest in the world, a VPN should be strong enough to tackle the Chinese censorship.

Download Speed

It sucks to have a slow VPN. Your browsing experience should not suffer because slow speeds are a killer and you cannot enjoy the streaming websites such as YouTube. 

Reliability – Being able to connect to a reliable server whenever you want. Also, the stability of connection is very crucial. If the connection keeps dropping, the VPN won’t be of much use. 

Security

 The whole purpose of using a VPN is to secure your identity online. If the VPN is not trust worthy or weak, your security can be compromised which can lead to unnecessary trouble. As a general rule, avoid using free VPN for China, especially because even the VPN provider has to make money somehow. The VPN provider cannot do everything for free and must earn revenue somehow which can be either by storing and selling your data to interested parties or to show you ads based on your browsing activity. It’s a risk you can avoid, just by opting for a paid VPN instead of a free one.

Ease of use

Ability to understand and use a VPN is also important. If a VPN is too complicated, you won’t be able to properly use it and end up compromising your identity online. The setup process and connection process must be very basic so that every user can understand it and use it in the best way possible. 

Customer Service

 You might face connection errors and other relevant problems with a VPN, therefore, you must be able to contact the customer support. If you use a paid VPN for China, you will probably get.

 

Here are our top VPNs that will make your lives easier while you are in China.

What makes Great Firewall of China so formidable?

As mentioned earlier, the internet is tightly controlled within the country. The ministry of IT is responsible for providing real time censorship, meaning that whatever enters and exits China digitally, is monitored and manipulated by the ministry. In order to ensure proper regulation of internet, there are several measures that are kept in place. 

URL Filtering: 

This type of filtering is based on the database filtering measure. If a user is searching for a website with sensitive keyword, the website will never load completely. The loading process will continue to occur however it won’t ever finish loading, this is an indication you are being restricted from using this website. Websites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google are also banned.

DNS Poisoning: 

When users connect to websites, computers will contact the DNS server and request for the IP address. The Firewall works to ‘poisons’ the DNS responses, returning corrupt addresses and making the websites inaccessible at all.

Self-Censorship: 

This measure requires the companies operating in China to ensure that no violations exist otherwise the company could be seriously penalized and the consequences are pretty harsh. In some instances, companies have also been forced to shut down due to the level of regulation violations. After such incidents, Chinese firms have now deployed their own team dedicated solely for enforcements. These teams are assigned list of prohibited topics which should not be published from the company’s platform. This measure is called self-censorship and it ensures that the company does not violate any rules & regulations. Similarly for individuals, it is common knowledge that using certain things are not allowed in China, if you get caught violating any censorship laws, it can lead to penalty or sentence (in some extreme cases). 

Manual enforcement: 

Many citizens are working for government to ensure manual enforcement. In order to monitor more than 700 million active internet users, hundreds and thousands civilians are employed. The filter criteria is already set on which these manual enforcers check whether the content being posted on internet complies with the regulations or not. Before the advancement in A.I technology, the manual enforcements could also change the uploaded content to make it comply with the regulations however, now through automation this process happens in real time. Through keywords placed in the directly, A.I can detect all ‘harmful’ contents and replace or delete it.

Blocking VPNs:

Not surprisingly, blocking VPN is on the list of measures against domestic network control in China. Since VPNs are known to break the boundaries put forward by the Chinese government, VPNs pose threat to national security of the country. Most noticeably VPNs started getting bans when the news that were supposedly hidden from the public started going viral. After that, the Chinese government put severe restrictions on the VPN usages. However, since they cannot completely ban the VPNs, you can always access the global internet. After that, some severe incidents such as the death of Nobel laureate, Liu Xiaobo in 2017 also resulted in full fledge ban of VPNs. This definitely resulted in damages for the international companies operating in China. The only exception in the history of China when VPNs were actually allowed – was the time of Olympics in 2008. All the players participating in Olympics and the media were allowed to access every blocked site. The great firewall works by identifying any traffic which resembles like a VPN and immediately attacks it in order to kill the connection. Only the Chinese versions of social media websites are allowed to ‘access’ which are obviously controlled and regulated by the government and this is where the propaganda game is played and the citizens are kept locked away from the rest of the world.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

According to previous leaders of China, the citizens are discouraged from using the global internet because it will bring in western beliefs and the Chinese culture might get affected in the long run. A leader of China was recorded saying a sentence which translated to “if you keep the windows open, fresh air will come; however, it will also invite flies to come in”. This is loosely translated to the idea that an open internet might be a fresh look for the country however, it would invite in western beliefs and ideas that will eventually hurt the culture of China. This ideology belongs to a dictatorship and a communist mindset and it is still in practice in China; however, the young generation of the country is smarter than that and the use of VPN for China locals have significantly improved since the people found out how much they are being controlled in the name of ‘protecting the culture’.

Some areas of China are under more control than the rest of the China for example, Xinjiang – a region of political instability and chaos.  The people of Xinjiang are more controlled in terms of what they can access and what they can see. The government decides in its ultimate wisdom (not), what the people of Xinjiang should believe in. The further explain the severity in this region, consider the camps that the government has placed which are sort of like prisons but the government calls it “educational camps” in which the people of Xinjiang are taken and literally brainwashed. This way the government is impeding freedom of speech and violating human rights in the name of Communism.

The Great Firewall of China was essentially a political agenda which also helped the country economically. Through the internet restrictions, foreign businesses couldn’t enter the Chinese market and the domestic companies got the full pie to themselves. Unlike other countries where competition is taking place at an international level, Chinese companies do not need to worry about it. This was the reason why China got their own search engine giant, Baida, Alibaba and Tencent. Foreign companies got discouraged because doing business in China means to abide by the rules of the country aka letting them access the private information of users and also avoid posting the stuff which is controversial.

The Great Firewall of China with its harsh regulations resulted in China being sealed up from rest of the world. After China closed its doors for rest of the world, the people started to believe all the propagandas fed to them by the Chinese government and ignorance among the citizens increased for the outside world. Many applications that China has are copies of international social apps; they are either owned by the government or have severe regulation control over them. These apps ensure that the content visible the population of china is what the government wants them to see. In the recent 2018 World Press Freedom Index surveyed by Reporters without Border, China was ranked Ranked 176th out of the surveyed 180 countries.

After the Firewall was activated, most scholars suffered from it. The amount of collateral damage because of the Great Firewall is to a great extent. Since scholars were unable to access global work of other international scholar, it hindered the exchange of ideas from overseas. This is why the government has banned students and scholars from accessing the global scholarly work. In an attempt to be self-sufficient, the government has started giving out subsidies to businesses going abroad and giving out scholarships to students going abroad to study. This tactic is always used to import knowledge and wisdom back to China and the move has not been welcomed by the US or EU.

For a normal Chinese, the Firewall maybe insignificant; however, for the intellectual Chinese, the Firewall is a burden that hindered in their way to attempting knowledge. Nevertheless, after using our selected VPNs you will be able to access the global internet. Whether you are a scholar or an ordinary internet user, VPNs are bound to make your lives easier!