Because it’s difficult to download VPN’s in China, (the government has a vested interest in blocking those too) we downloaded a couple on our laptop, tablet and cell phones while we were still in the U.S. That means we had to guess at which VPN’s would work the best once we were over here. Certain VPN’s work better in some locations than others and even what works changes frequently. Just because a VPN worked great for someone who was just recently in China doesn’t mean it’s going to work without a hitch for you. The best we could do was research online, ask on Facebook groups what VPN’s others who’ve recently traveled worked well and hope for the best. Given the problems we’ve encountered, I should have done more research, but it’s a lot for a non-techie like myself to take in, and “installing VPN’s” was just one of many items on a pages-long list of preparations for China.
We’ve ended up having a lot of difficulty accessing blocked sites while in China and have even run into quite frequent problems accessing those that aren’t blocked. Sometimes we’d get logged into the VPN, only to have it drop the connection, other times we’d be logged in, but couldn’t access blocked (or even unblocked) sites and other times we weren’t able to log into a VPN, but if we tried again later, it worked fine. When we were in Beijing, someone posted an article on one of our Facebook groups about how “China announced it is ‘upgrading’ its Internet censorship to disrupt VPN services.” I have such a limited understanding of VPN’s or even how the Internet works to even guess if this is the reasons for our difficulties.
Meanwhile, we’re making do with the limited access we have. We brought a travel router, which has been a lifesaver, because when the Internet is slow, it makes it that much more difficult to connect to a VPN. Without it, we would not have been able to log into any VPN’s at our hotel in Beijing, and it’s made doing things like uploading pictures to our Facebook pages possible.
Unfortunately, now that we’re in Guangzhou, the only VPN that works is the one specifically for Apple devices (Onavo), which means we have it on our iPhones, but not our non-Apple laptop or tablet. To update my blog, I type my post in Word on my laptop, copy and paste the post into an e-mail in my Hotmail account and e-mail it to my Gmail e-mail address. I open up Gmail on my phone and copy and paste the post into my blog. It’s reasonably straight-forward, but it often takes me a couple tries between the VPN dropping and me touching the wrong button while working off such a small screen on my iPhone. Even when I could access my blog on my laptop, trying to add pictures to my posts slowed things to a crawl, (even with the router) so that’ll just have to wait until I get home.
Since I can’t access Facebook on my laptop here in Guangzhou, posting pictures to Facebook got a lot more cumbersome. I upload the pictures on my laptop and e-mail them from my Hotmail account to my Gmail account. I can only e-mail three to four pictures at a time. I then open up the e-mail on my phone, wait for the pictures to load, which takes forever, and then save the pictures to my phone. Posting the pictures to Facebook once they’re on my phone is pretty easy, but as you can see, it’s time-consuming to get to that point.
For anyone heading to China, here's our list of what VPN's worked and didn't work. No one VPN ever worked perfectly, so when I say something worked, it means that I got it to work with enough frequency to be usable.
Beijing: Onavo (yes), Panda Pow (yes), Express VPN (no), VPN Express (no)
Hefei, Anhui: Onavo (yes), Panda Pow (yes), Express VPN (no), VPN Express (no)
Guangzhou, Guangdong: Onavo (yes), Panda Pow (no), Express VPN (no), VPN Express (no); another family here says Vyper has been working for them, but we didn't download this one due to bad reviews by previous families.
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