Can China Care? - GB in China

Hey. So, I'm very likely to be spending the coming year in Shanghai. Now I'm sure we all have heard of the Great Firewall of China, which I have experienced before on vacation, but that was for only ten days. Living there a year, I suspect I'll be rather displeased with my internet speeds and access. Now, I know I'll be able to bypass the firewall through proxies or VPN, but I've no idea about what sort of speed would be available.

So, any duders in China? Does anything GB get through the wall without the bypasses and if so, is it at all tolerable speeds? Thanks.

I studied and then worked in Beijing. It's all good, obviously don't use the youtube source though ;)

Speeds through VPN greatly depends on your ISP and your VPN. Usually I didn't have huge speed drops but yeah, don't expect anything like you're getting in the states (presumably)

I'm posting this from Shanghai right now. For giantbomb at least, the speeds are fine for loading up the pages, watching videos etc. as well as the looking at the live streams.

The problem comes from accessing sites like Youtube, or Bloomberg or the New York Times, which are blocked .

Sites like Google, Imgur experience slowdowns and sporadic outages. But those usually go away within 30 min.

To fix the imgur thing just change the url to filmot from imgur and it should work the same. This add on worked wonders for me last time I was in China

I think this question should be directed to the Chinese born and/or staying in China. I don't think business trips or student exchange or vacation count.

what difference does it make? OP has the answers from me who has lived in China for over a year and another duder currently living there

Are there any difference between people living in China, and people just visiting? Wouldn't the same rules apply, ie. NYT and Bloomberg being banned because the Party is embarrassed about their own corruption/wealth?

Your mileage may vary depending on your ISP and/or VPN. When I was working in Shanghai last year, my home internet was pretty bad for oversea websites while my office internet worked fine for the most part. Access to oversea servers will most likely suffer during peak hours and holiday periods where traffic becomes high. @rice_crust seems to have a decent experience with his ISP, so perhaps consult him for some advice about that.

If you desperately want to access blocked sites from China, you should consider using a paid VPN since most free VPNs are already blocked. Beware that China continues to block VPNs whenever they feel like it, so unless it's a corporate VPN you might get locked out suddenly without notice.

Also note that China has a tendency to block Google at times for reasons unknown. Google and Gmail were blocked for an extended period from 2011 to 2012. Access appears to have been restored, but ongoing access is not guaranteed. Twitch was unblocked some time last year, so have fun with that. Twitter and Facebook, however, remain blocked.

Lastly, watch your internet mouth. A colleague and I both had cops come knock on our doors out of the blues and gave us a talk about some stuff we posted on the internet regarding China. Nothing bad happened but the experience was pretty damn surreal. They basically told us that, while they know people hop the Wall all of the time, they don't really mind as long as it's not critical of how the country handles certain sensitive issues. Really weird, but it happened. My name is probably on a list somewhere, now.

Have fun during your stay in Shanghai, though! The climate isn't great during the summer and winter, and you'll get your fair share of mosquito bites for sure, but it's an interesting place to live. Go get yourself some Shanghai-style dumplings and traditional confections. The Bund is beautiful at night, so sit by the river and have a few drinks at all of those bars. Have fun singing lots of karaoke and, if you're a duder, visit some hostess clubs. Just don't do take-out unless someone else is paying. ;P

@cramsy: @amyggen: I think there's a difference between those who live there all their life vs someone whose only been there for a year or so. Culture, society and memes can change a person - a year and change, in my opinion, is not enough time to change someone.

Consider a Citizen VS a permanent resident VS someone whose working in a country with a visa. These 3 subsets of people would prioritize certain things differently I think.

But anyway, my bad. I thought the OP was asking if China cared (about, I dunno, stuff, in the most general sense). I didn't read the post clearly and didn't notice it was a question about VPNs and firewalls.

But that doesn't change the access you have to different internet sites, the internet speed etc. The OP is asking about that, not about the culture, if people are okay with the government censoring their internet access or similar questions. And since the OP is just spending a year in Shanghai, I'd argue that the experience of someone just visiting/living there as a student for a year is more relevant than the experience of a native.

@zomgfruitbunnies: China has been known to block Google for short periods when certain events happen (they also block seach words regulary). If I'm not mistaken, they did that during the breakout of the Arab Spring among other events. But yeah, it's not like they're very upfront about those things.

@amyggen: Oh yeah, certain keywords will block access to search engines for a short period of time (like 5 minutes or so, depending on the ISP). I think the last time they blocked Google was during an important government conference, or so my colleagues told me, and also during the anniversary for the Tiananmen Square Incident.

What sort of Up/Download speed do you typically get? Does steam download at a reasonable clip? with some games being about 20GB like MGR:R, I'm worried it'll take weeks to download some stuff. I've lived in some fairly remote spots in Thailand before this and the speeds often stuck at 50kbps on nasty old ADSL lines. Are there any broadband options that anyone knows about available?

Oh, and yeah, this really wasn't meant as a cultural question everybody. I just meant the title as a throwback to the in-joke on this site.

I'm posting this from Wuxi (about 2 hours west of Shanghai), and like Cramsy says, the speed through the internet greatly depends on your ISP and VPN. At my first apartment, the speeds through the VPN were so bad that it would take 15 seconds to load a page. But, since I've moved to a new apartment with a different ISP, I've found my speed drastically increase, to the point that I can stream video and play blocked mmo's through it.

So just be a bit wary of which ISP to use, and you should have no problems!

So, in that case, could folks let me know of good ISP names?

Hmm I can't remember exactly but China Unicom and China Mobile both had good plans in Beijing. I'm pretty sure their service would be similar in Shanghai :) How much Chinese can you speak?

@aelric: Whenever you do start your job there, and provided you work out a solid ISP, please pop in the forums and give a status update on how living in China is. I've studied Chinese due to my current job, but never had the chance to get over there, and likely won't anytime in the future. So super interested to hear some perspectives!

Good luck over there!

@takayamasama: I'd love to give some blog posts about China, though I fear living abroad is not as exciting as it may sound. There tends to be a honeymoon period where you go out and do everything you can, followed by a long depression of staying inside and being dissatisfied, and eventually you just function in the country the same as you would at home. The weirdest part is when you return home, and you get reverse culture shock and you have the profound feeling that you don't fit in anymore. It goes away, or so they say. I've never stayed back in the states long enough to find out if it wears off or not, I just keep running off to Asia.

Honestly, you should just bite the bullet and visit China if you are interested in it. International travel isn't nearly as expensive as people assume if you use the right travel sites. I'll be flying over there for just $500.

I speak zero Chinese. I'm an English Teacher, have been doing EFL for 5 years in Korea and Thailand, now China. Knowing the native language is not really necessary to living in a foreign country, though it does help. Chinese is a tough nut to crack, though. I found Korean to be a lot easier, and Thai involved more social graces and body language and thus wasn't too hard to get by either.