Comment on The uncensored library: The digital home of press freedom
NateNate60@lemmy.world 2 weeks agoThe only experience I have with countries that have censored Internet access is China, but I can say that all ordinary methods for connecting to Tor will not work and using commercial VPNs is really a game of whack-a-mole with the Chinese government.
The idea is not to be 100% effective, it’s to make evading the censorship hard enough that most people don’t really care to do so. Everyone in China knows how to evade the Great Firewall but most people just don’t care about the fact that their Internet access is censored.
lena@gregtech.eu 2 weeks ago
I assume you tried the bridge?
NateNate60@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah, I did. No good, unfortunately. Could not get TOR to work at all unless connected to a VPN or using a foreign SIM card.
If you have a foreign SIM card then you can get access to the unfiltered Internet in China. So if you’re planning a trip to China, I recommend doing that. I bought an eSim from SoSim which is a Hong Kong carrier (there is no firewall in Hong Kong—yet) and it was like 20 USD for the 14-day “Greater China region” pass. I think it had like 10 GB of data which was enough for my purposes. Extra data is pretty cheap anyway and they take foreign credit cards. No 5G or even 4G LTE though (you have to pay extra for that which sucks). You only get plain old 4G which is passable but disappointing. China throttles traffic to foreign IPs (even unblocked ones) so I don’t think 5G would be a huge benefit anyway.
While connected to WiFi, I was able to set up my own OpenVPN server and that worked as well. Their blocking seems to be DNS based. If you keep it to yourself and don’t share your server publicly, I think you should be good.
Since China is mostly cashless, all digital transactions are tracked and monitored, and selling access to an illegal VPN server will result in severe consequences. The Government doesn’t actually care about individual people getting around the Great Firewall.
But like I said, the idea is not to be perfect but to make it annoying enough to get around that ordinary people don’t bother.