News The China VPN situation is crazy (it's *OVER*)

Orientalist

INFP - 23 years old - Been to 8 countries
Joined
Jun 7, 2024
Messages
1,445
Reaction score
2,242
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:
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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
  4. Don't move to China and therefore don't worry about this. But you can still travel here short term relatively comfortably. Brutal!
Sources:
1777371889617.png
they might patch the IPv6 thing any day now

1777371355566.png
 
Patching VPNs is impossible don’t worry. There’s always a way. China would have to manufacture an entire state owned intranet to really do it. Let’s not forget the government officials need VPNs too haha.
 
Nationalized search engine, nationalized servers for Microsoft like stuff and so on. If you get what I mean.
 
Patching VPNs is impossible don’t worry. There’s always a way. China would have to manufacture an entire state owned intranet to really do it. Let’s not forget the government officials need VPNs too haha.
Idk if an intranet is totally necessary, but they're getting pretty fucking close anyways. If they control every single ISP, they inspect every single packet coming in and out of their network, inclusing jump servers/hop nodes and anything like that, where src/dst IP headers have to be unobfuscated at some part in the chain. So it's simply over for you if they blacklist anything outside China's geolocation.
 
And for the whole muh economy argument, companies can already pay the low low price of $500 USD/month for access to the outside internet (usually to do very specific things they detail in an application like using a certain app/website)
 
don't they have waves of cracking down on VPNs every few months/years, and then it mostly goes back to normal?
or is this time different?
 
don't they have waves of cracking down on VPNs every few months/years, and then it mostly goes back to normal?
or is this time different?
AFAICT the historical crackdowns have been cease & desisting commercial providers. This is an actual upgrade to the GFW
 
Brutal, that’s gonna make it super difficult for me to go to China.
But good info, thanks for posting.
On the plus side there’s gonna be less competition for dudes who stay
 
Yeah on the bright side teacher salaries will also go back up like during covid if most foreigners leave over this. Im probably still going to China but may have to make it more of a shorter term stay if this actually materializes.
 
I don’t mind not being able to access shi anyways!

You can contact me on here from now on as I’m going off the grid. Native. No more x. No more tiktok. No more ig, my feed is complete.

Oh wait I can’t access my bank accounts and emails

ITS OVER
 
Yeah on the bright side teacher salaries will also go back up like during covid if most foreigners leave over this. Im probably still going to China but may have to make it more of a shorter term stay if this actually materializes.
Honestly idk. I thought about this, but I think life just might just get more enshittified for expats with not a ton of people ragequitting in one fell swoop - certainly nothing like covid level. It's death by a thousand papercuts since there will always be workarounds along the way. VPNs aren't patched now - but I made this post because things continue to escalate, and they can be patched at literally any monent. In reality, it might take a few years for them to be totally dead
 
if young chinese women can't/stop using VPNs because its too hard, that will pretty much kill all the easy dates expats used to have through western dating apps

so I can see pretty much all the single expats and all the newly arrived leaving
 
if young chinese women can't/stop using VPNs because its too hard, that will pretty much kill all the easy dates expats used to have through western dating apps

so I can see pretty much all the single expats and all the newly arrived leaving
Never even thought about that yet - truly over. Guess all of us in China should get married
 
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 Chinse-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:
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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
  4. Don't move to China and therefore don't worry about this. But you can still travel here short term relatively comfortably. Brutal!
be grateful for what you have lil bro. in russia the internet is no longer a thing anymore even in Moscow so the vpn problem is not relevant. They are patching all geomaxxing destinations soon we ll have to go to Papua new guinea and get molested by cannibal tribes
 
Thanks for the info. I planned to work remotely in China this year, but should think about this twice now.

Same thing in Russia. I was sitting in St. Petersburg thinking I am very prepared with my own VPN server but their deep packet inspection just detected it and blocked it. So if I didn’t have my foreign eSIM it would have been no WhatsApp, instagram or YouTube for me.

They even block SSH connections which are open to long. In the end after trying out multiple things I could get a AmneziaVPN server setup working, which masks all traffic as HTTPS. But this has an significant speed disadvantage

Weirdly enough in Russia it depends a lot on the internet service provider. The girl I was seeing used a smaller unknown service provider and did had no restrictions at all
 
be grateful for what you have lil bro. in russia the internet is no longer a thing anymore even in Moscow so the vpn problem is not releva
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:
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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
  4. Don't move to China and therefore don't worry about this. But you can still travel here short term relatively comfortably. Brutal!
Sources:
View attachment 13701
they might patch the IPv6 thing any day now

View attachment 13700

nt. They are patching all geomaxxing destinations soon we ll have to go to Papua new guinea and get molested by cannibal tribes
This is actually fire news.
You guys don't see the vision, most "geomaxxers" or westerners in general arent brave or smart enough to go to any of these places if there is the slightest inconvenience, for example for Bangladesh it would be because its dirty and percieved as "dangerous" which makes it amazing cause theres not a single other white person here, for China it was becoming too touristy anyways so now if they start doing shit like this its going to scare away all the pussies so it would make it easier for those of us who find a way to overcome these issues.
In contrast places that are super easy like Thailand and Vietnam get fully ruined and some parts are basically whiter than Europe. So the fact that more countries like China are getting difficult again is great news. Just a few years back everyone thought of China as this scary authoritarian dictatorship which scared away everyone, and thats when it was the best, I went there back in 2024 it was still pretty undiscovered compared to now at least, and I was getting crazy attention and the people were very nice to me, my friend went earlier this year and had quite a different experience (alot of tourists and the locals not so nice anymore). Of course China is huge so it depends which province and city but still, I was hating what China was becoming, like the next Japan, so this is great.
If places are too easy then everyone flocks there, so we want different countries to have their own difficulty or barrier of entry, we cant rely on people not knowing about them because that never lasts with social media anyways.

Anyways I actually want to see how you guys figure this out cause I wanna go back to China soon and go to second tier and third tier cities lol.
 
This is actually fire news.
You guys don't see the vision, most "geomaxxers" or westerners in general arent brave or smart enough to go to any of these places if there is the slightest inconvenience, for example for Bangladesh it would be because its dirty and percieved as "dangerous" which makes it amazing cause theres not a single other white person here, for China it was becoming too touristy anyways so now if they start doing shit like this its going to scare away all the pussies so it would make it easier for those of us who find a way to overcome these issues.
In contrast places that are super easy like Thailand and Vietnam get fully ruined and some parts are basically whiter than Europe. So the fact that more countries like China are getting difficult again is great news. Just a few years back everyone thought of China as this scary authoritarian dictatorship which scared away everyone, and thats when it was the best, I went there back in 2024 it was still pretty undiscovered compared to now at least, and I was getting crazy attention and the people were very nice to me, my friend went earlier this year and had quite a different experience (alot of tourists and the locals not so nice anymore). Of course China is huge so it depends which province and city but still, I was hating what China was becoming, like the next Japan, so this is great.
If places are too easy then everyone flocks there, so we want different countries to have their own difficulty or barrier of entry, we cant rely on people not knowing about them because that never lasts with social media anyways.

Anyways I actually want to see how you guys figure this out cause I wanna go back to China soon and go to second tier and third tier cities lol.
id agree but unfortunately im trying to move to guangzhou just to make $$$, and if VPN's are permabanned that makes my life HELL


@Orientalist is it possible that they can block me from RDP'ing into a PC at my home in canada?
 
This is actually fire news.
You guys don't see the vision, most "geomaxxers" or westerners in general arent brave or smart enough to go to any of these places if there is the slightest inconvenience, for example for Bangladesh it would be because its dirty and percieved as "dangerous" which makes it amazing cause theres not a single other white person here, for China it was becoming too touristy anyways so now if they start doing shit like this its going to scare away all the pussies so it would make it easier for those of us who find a way to overcome these issues.
In contrast places that are super easy like Thailand and Vietnam get fully ruined and some parts are basically whiter than Europe. So the fact that more countries like China are getting difficult again is great news. Just a few years back everyone thought of China as this scary authoritarian dictatorship which scared away everyone, and thats when it was the best, I went there back in 2024 it was still pretty undiscovered compared to now at least, and I was getting crazy attention and the people were very nice to me, my friend went earlier this year and had quite a different experience (alot of tourists and the locals not so nice anymore). Of course China is huge so it depends which province and city but still, I was hating what China was becoming, like the next Japan, so this is great.
If places are too easy then everyone flocks there, so we want different countries to have their own difficulty or barrier of entry, we cant rely on people not knowing about them because that never lasts with social media anyways.

Anyways I actually want to see how you guys figure this out cause I wanna go back to China soon and go to second tier and third tier cities lol.
dont know about that man. usually changes like that mean that something like a big war is on the rise or civil war because people get angry. look at nepal or iran situation when they decided to shut down media. and overall worlds situation is quite unstable so they can lowkey sneak in on taiwan
 
@Orientalist is it possible that they can block me from RDP'ing into a PC at my home in canada?
GFW has always operated at OSI layer 3 (TCP/IP) afaik so yes, no application-layer protocol like RDP circumvents it. You need a working VPN to do anything with the outside internet
 
This is actually fire news.
You guys don't see the vision, most "geomaxxers" or westerners in general arent brave or smart enough to go to any of these places if there is the slightest inconvenience, for example for Bangladesh it would be because its dirty and percieved as "dangerous" which makes it amazing cause theres not a single other white person here, for China it was becoming too touristy anyways so now if they start doing shit like this its going to scare away all the pussies so it would make it easier for those of us who find a way to overcome these issues.
In contrast places that are super easy like Thailand and Vietnam get fully ruined and some parts are basically whiter than Europe. So the fact that more countries like China are getting difficult again is great news. Just a few years back everyone thought of China as this scary authoritarian dictatorship which scared away everyone, and thats when it was the best, I went there back in 2024 it was still pretty undiscovered compared to now at least, and I was getting crazy attention and the people were very nice to me, my friend went earlier this year and had quite a different experience (alot of tourists and the locals not so nice anymore). Of course China is huge so it depends which province and city but still, I was hating what China was becoming, like the next Japan, so this is great.
If places are too easy then everyone flocks there, so we want different countries to have their own difficulty or barrier of entry, we cant rely on people not knowing about them because that never lasts with social media anyways.

Anyways I actually want to see how you guys figure this out cause I wanna go back to China soon and go to second tier and third tier cities lol.
High iq. When other travel communities flee certain destinations, us geomaxxers must go head first

And I agree with the 2024 vs 2025 china experience as someone that started going in 2023. I just assumed it was cuz I’ve not been able to keep up with looksflation + more chink thots getting on ig and interacting with chads on ht
 
I agree with everything carboxylic acid said, but the thing is, I genuinely don’t know if this is gonna have any affect on western tourism. Even if you literally had to embrace the GFW idk if people will care jfl maybe they’ll just see it as a detox for a week or 2. And like I said, there will always be some workarounds which barely change the meta for people traveling; it just makes life shitty for people actually trying to live there, ie not tourists. Everyone and their mother has seen “tips before traveling to china!!1” and what kind of apps you need and they’re all gonna keep saying to download a VPN even if 99.9% of them don’t work anymore. If they made a law today that patched all methods to 翻墙 it would still probably take a year or more for it to be common knowledge. All the memetic hype around China has been downstream of the implicit assumption that the CCP is a paper tiger (especially for the many who just see the whole thing as another spectacle) and that VPNs have worked a-okay since the GFW’s inception. I mean come on, anyone like me who’s interacted with friends/family talking about moving to/living in china, how many people do you know mentioned something about “isn’t their internet all blocked”? And then how many people do you know who want to travel to China? It’s a big venn diagram if you ask me; on average there is some overlap
Normie circles who get all their info on tt/ig will probably never hear about anything I mentioned in OP

Which is why the moral of the story for me is to do what works for now. It’s just annoying (even before this crackdown) and makes it a weird place to live. Negligible effect on China becoming the next Japan for normies
 
Last edited:
This is actually fire news.
You guys don't see the vision, most "geomaxxers" or westerners in general arent brave or smart enough to go to any of these places if there is the slightest inconvenience, for example for Bangladesh it would be because its dirty and percieved as "dangerous" which makes it amazing cause theres not a single other white person here, for China it was becoming too touristy anyways so now if they start doing shit like this its going to scare away all the pussies so it would make it easier for those of us who find a way to overcome these issues.
In contrast places that are super easy like Thailand and Vietnam get fully ruined and some parts are basically whiter than Europe. So the fact that more countries like China are getting difficult again is great news. Just a few years back everyone thought of China as this scary authoritarian dictatorship which scared away everyone, and thats when it was the best, I went there back in 2024 it was still pretty undiscovered compared to now at least, and I was getting crazy attention and the people were very nice to me, my friend went earlier this year and had quite a different experience (alot of tourists and the locals not so nice anymore). Of course China is huge so it depends which province and city but still, I was hating what China was becoming, like the next Japan, so this is great.
If places are too easy then everyone flocks there, so we want different countries to have their own difficulty or barrier of entry, we cant rely on people not knowing about them because that never lasts with social media anyways.

Anyways I actually want to see how you guys figure this out cause I wanna go back to China soon and go to second tier and third tier cities lol.
The issue with that is that SMV of westerners abroad has more to do with the economic/social status of local men then however many foreigners are traveling/living there. Take like late 2000's, 2010's shanghai, there were definitely a ton of foreigners there then too but the SMV of westerners back then was certainly higher than it is now.
Number one issue is that westerners aren't as glorified/shilled now compared to back then, when hollywood and american media ruled the world, now most of those chinese girls prefer to watch cdramas/kdramas and are psyopped to prefer their own race. This is on top of the fact that most well earning men in their circles would be rich betabuxxing chinese men, not english teachers.
Like really think about it for a second, do you really think a white dude geomaxxing in North Korea would be viable? It has little to do with how "easy" a place is to get to.
 
china will never become second japan for normies, its fucking ugly, chinlets scream instead of talking, they clear throat and spit flegma so loud you can hear it on 20th floor in your apartment
chinese language is like one of worst sounding ones in asia (world tbh) and japanese is in top3 best
japan has big comfy cities and beautiful beaches, chinese cities only look good when its dark and absolutely not a single good beach city, hainan is a joke and 'small' cities like xiamen ugly - with typical city beaches meaning dirty water and sand mixed with dog shit

girls? just imagine chinese girl screaming in chinese to your ear
then imagine japanese soft talking jap

if you ask chat gpt it will tell you to learn chinese and go there because of 'business opportunities' jfl
but what does that exactly mean? you will sit in guangzhou and look for shit you can send to europe? nahhh they dont need and want you there
i know consensus on this forum is china mogs but ive been multiple times in both and i fucking hate chinese people

btw chinese girls are most soulless creatures in the world, they dont understand compassion and honor, the ONLY reasons she will fuck with you are either: youre her new handbag for statusmax her up OR you will buy new handbags for her
 
China is best place to larp as early 1900s colonialist in with disdain and slight racisim towards the local population but appreciating the culture and history literature etc (NOT the food)
 
China is best place to larp as early 1900s colonialist in with disdain and slight racisim towards the local population but appreciating the culture and history literature etc (NOT the food)
Hong Kong for 2x'ing this feeling but with less racism and more appreciating contemporary art instead of historical
 
i bet its peak but sounds more expensive than toronto :(
It is and from what i remember native Hong konger women(not the recent mainland immigrants from outside Guangdong) aren't that great looks wise and are stuck up. Great place for the vibe and its history no doubt and I would def go back just for those things but it's not the best geomaxxing destination.
 
btw chinese girls are most soulless creatures in the world, they dont understand compassion and honor, the ONLY reasons she will fuck with you are either: youre her new handbag for statusmax her up OR you will buy new handbags for her
What provinces or areas of ethnically Han China have the least sociopathic women that are like this then? In my limited experience I didn't really get that vibe from a couple of them that I dated.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top