What is the Best VPN for China? (hint: it's a trick question)

- Spoiler alert, there is no best VPN for China

and every other video you watch that says otherwise

I can almost guarantee you

that that person has never lived in China.

If you'll trust me with just a few minutes of your time

I promise you the stories and strategies

I'm about to share with you

will change the way you view both the internet

and VPNs in China.

My name's Josh and ever since

I first moved to China in 2006,

I've been using VPNs to stream my favorite shows,

access the news and generally evade the censorship.

It's affectionately known by expats

as the great firewall of China.

My goal here isn't to just share with you a list of VPNs,

make an affiliate commission, then be on my way.

I wanna help educate you on how censorship in China works,

answer whether or not it's legal to use a VPN in China

and then explain my strategy

that has allowed me to successfully connect to a VPN

for years in China.

Let's begin with a quick history of censorship here.

It wasn't until the early 2000s

that China's Ministry of Information

began to censor the internet.

It officially began in late 2006

when China started its Golden Shield Project

which is now known as the Great Firewall.

It was barely noticeable at first,

mainly just porn websites

and a few blatant anti-Chinese websites.

But then 2009 the flood gates opened

or rather they close tightly.

YouTube was blocked in March, followed by Facebook,

Twitter and others in July.

From 2009 on censorship in China became so widespread

that the question changed from

what is blocked in China to what isn't blocked to China?

China says they do this

for the protection of their population

and in some cases I can see the merits of this argument

but the fact is

is that VPNs are extremely popular among Chinese people.

It's the government's way of controlling

the flow of information

and before you jump on your soapbox

about authoritarian communist governments

and I admit I'm guilty of that as well.

Take a look at how your own government

is starting to quietly censor the internet,

you might be surprised.

So with this in mind, the most common question I'd get

about VPNs in China is this,

is it legal to use a VPN in China?

I'll answer this question

with a story from my own experience.

A few years ago while I lived

in the sensitive Western region of Xinjiang,

my phone that I'd been using for quite some time

it just stopped working.

I tried topping it up, restarting it,

whatever it was just no longer working.

So I took it into China, UNICOM, my cellular provider

and I was shocked when they told me

that my service had been cut by the local authorities

and that I would need to visit the police station

to get me started.

But when I got to the station

they actually went through my phone,

deleted all of my VPNs

and also other apps like Skype, Viber, Signal and others.

After they were done my phone service was reactivated

but as a test,

when I left the station I immediately

re-installed all of those apps

to see if my service would be cut again,

well, it never was.

I tell you this story,

basically as a worst case scenario,

I've never heard of a foreigner getting seriously punished

for using a VPN service.

Although with China,

anything is possible in the future, I realized that.

I can't say with certainty

whether it's illegal to use a VPN in China

because China's laws and policies are purposefully vague.

If China doesn't like you

they will find a way to nail you for something.

But if you just wanna use a VPN to access your email,

watch YouTube, stream Netflix,

countless expats in China

will tell you the same exact thing, you're gonna be fine.

Okay, now let's jump into some practical advice here,

what is the best VPN for China?

The answer is simple yet vague, it depends.

You see, we all tend to think that China's internet

runs into the single choke point

in Beijing where the authorities decide

what is or isn't blocked.

But this isn't true,

China's internet is actually censored on a local

and enterprise level with Beijing

sending directives on what should be blocked.

It's up to the Chinese social media companies

to censor themselves

and local governments and cities across China

to follow these directives from Beijing

and they sometimes put additional censorship in place

just for good measure.

Again, I've had the experience of traveling between cities

where an app on my phone was working in one place

and then all of a sudden it stopped working in another city.

The local government in one city had decided

that this communications app should be blocked

when the other city hadn't.

This is incredibly important to understand

when it comes to VPNs in China

because what works in one place in the country

might not work in another.

I've had people tell me that such and such VPN

works really well in Shanghai

but when I download and try it and Shindong,

I just could never connect.

So if you wanna connect to a VPN in China,

here's my three-step strategy that I use

and recommend to others.

First, I download multiple VPN services

that all offer 30 day money-back guarantees.

Here's a list of my favorite

and if you'd like to help support this channel

please use the affiliate links in the description below.

Each of these VPNs has historically worked well in China.

They fought through a number of VPN crackdowns

over the past decade and at least in my experience

they have good customer support.

Second, once you're settled in China,

spend a couple of weeks testing each VPN

on different devices.

You'll find that some probably connect easier than others

and some have better speeds.

The last thing you do is keep the one or two

that you like most and get refunds on the rest.

I tend to keep at least two active VPN accounts

while I'm in China because

there are times when one experiences a crackdown

and I still need consistent access to the open internet.

I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that one VPN

is always the best in China

because as I've already said,

that's never been my experience,

I think most foreigners here would agree.

Ask some other foreigners

in the area where you'll live in China what they use,

try a number of different services

and find out what works best for you.

And if at all possible download and sign up for these VPNs

before you leave for China

because I can tell you from experience

that it's quite hard to do so once you're here in China.

'Cause as you might expect,

China's sensors VPN websites too.

What's been your experience so far?

I answer all questions in the comments as best as I can

so I encourage you to leave yours now,

use the links in the description

and please give this video a thumbs up if it's been helpful.