Orientalist
INFP - 23 years old - Been to 8 countries
- Jun 7, 2024
- 1,440
- 2,234
The government has been cracking down on VPNs hard over the past couple weeks, and one of the most devastating blows has been China Mobile (1 of the 3 main mobile providers along with China Unicom and China Telecom) apparently switching to a whitelist system where only Chinese IPs are allowed to create a TCP connection with them. China Mobile is what I use, so as of right now, I literally can't use any VPN on my mobile data, which includes my US VPS-based self-hosted VLESS/Xray setup I've been using for quite a while. Thank god I stay home most of the day anyways. I've been going through Chinese Twitter and asking Qwen/Kimi which are surprisingly uncensored and trying to piece together what's going on.
Therefore, it's essentially a matter of time before every mobile provider do it, and then all Wi-fi networks do it. There's basically a clear path to VPNs totally getting patched.
As many people know, the majority of the younger generation probably uses a VPN. So it's honestly pretty depressing to imagine how closed off their society will be if VPNs as we know them get patched and literally all mainland Chinese people not able to communicate with the outside world unless they travel or get their hands on a eSIM app (since Chinese-sold phones don't have eSIMs for reasons like this, lol). You need to be increasingly tech savvy. Pretty soon, gone are the days of installing an app and having it work OOTB like it's nordvpn. And then there's the fact that the vast majority of first-world expats just here for work will probably leave.
There are a few options:
they might patch the IPv6 thing any day now
Therefore, it's essentially a matter of time before every mobile provider do it, and then all Wi-fi networks do it. There's basically a clear path to VPNs totally getting patched.
As many people know, the majority of the younger generation probably uses a VPN. So it's honestly pretty depressing to imagine how closed off their society will be if VPNs as we know them get patched and literally all mainland Chinese people not able to communicate with the outside world unless they travel or get their hands on a eSIM app (since Chinese-sold phones don't have eSIMs for reasons like this, lol). You need to be increasingly tech savvy. Pretty soon, gone are the days of installing an app and having it work OOTB like it's nordvpn. And then there's the fact that the vast majority of first-world expats just here for work will probably leave.
There are a few options:
- Use an international eSIM. But even then this might get cooked. Anyone traveling is probably doing this already. I'm not sure how the government would go about patching this, which is why I put this option first. But if you want to work or otherwise 'start a life' in China and use most of the apps, you're gonna need a +86 phone number, and therefore you're gonna need to use one of these now-cooked SIMs. Basically every phone can only have 2 in use at a time, which is annoying if you want to also keep your number(s) from your home country in use at the same time. But yeah: many apps, tourist attractions even, captive portals, websites/mini apps, etc. etc. in China' massive digital ecosystem - more often than not are based around SMS verification codes and hard lock the country code at +86 so you're pretty fucked if you're not just willy nilly traveling. An esim based in Hong Kong is what a lot of people do, but just remember that some sites are even banned there, e.g. Tiktok and most LLMs like ChatGPT or Japan, You can use other countries like Japan or Singapore, but it might not play nice with some of the Chinese apps.
- Have a VPN setup with a jump server within China. Any commercial providers still around probably do this, and it's therefore part of why some commercial providers are officially shutting down, let alone not working, including LetsVPN since companies face heavy fines (it increases all the time) for doing that kind of thing. I also don't really know how to find them since a lot of the communication Mandarin Telegram groups. But there still a few VPN services still working (almost always ShadowSocks-based) but it's a constant game of whack-a-mole like it's always been, this time on meth.
- Some VPN protocols aren't patched yet. I'm still in the process of researching them, but the patch seems to be just on IPv4 TCP TLS connections. So people are doing IPv6-only, or UDP/Hysteria2 setups. But they could get patched any day now if they're willing to just whitelist source/destination IPs on every packet. Or maybe a few years. Maybe never. Who the fuck knows. Ride the tiger
- Don't move to China and therefore don't worry about this. But you can still travel here short term relatively comfortably. Brutal!
they might patch the IPv6 thing any day now
