Written from inside China

Internet in China: what is blocked, what barely works, and what to do before you fly

Written from inside China, and kept current. Most of what you will find searching this topic was written in 2019 by somebody who spent four days in Shanghai. This is what the situation actually looks like now.

Two acronyms up front, used throughout. The GFW is the Great Firewall, the national system that filters traffic crossing China's borders. A VPN is a virtual private network, an encrypted tunnel from your device to a server elsewhere, so that filtering between the two cannot inspect or block individual requests.

Read the pre-departure checklist Jump to arrival, day zero

What breaks

Blocked, degraded, and quietly broken

The useful distinction is not blocked versus allowed. It is blocked, degraded, and quietly broken. The third category is what catches people out, because nothing announces itself as failing.

A busy Chinese street at pavement level, shopfronts and passers-by going about an ordinary day.
CC BY 2.0

Blocked outright

Google in every form, and it cascades

Search, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Maps, Google Calendar, Google Fonts, reCAPTCHA. This is the big one and it cascades further than people expect, because a huge share of Western websites load fonts, scripts or bot checks from Google and will hang or fail to render when those requests time out.

  • WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger, X, formerly Twitter, YouTube, Telegram, Signal
  • Reddit, Wikipedia in most language editions, Twitch, Pinterest
  • Most Western news, including the BBC, the New York Times, the Guardian, Reuters, Bloomberg and Le Monde, though the exact list moves
Common services and how they behave on a plain Chinese connection, with no tunnel.
Service On a plain Chinese connection
Google, Gmail, Drive, Maps, Fonts, reCAPTCHABlocked
WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, X, YouTube, Telegram, SignalBlocked
Reddit, Wikipedia, Twitch, Pinterest, most Western newsBlocked
Slack, Notion, Figma, Linear, GitHub, AtlassianDegraded, not reliable
Outlook web, Teams calls, OneDrive syncDegraded, varies by day and network
Google Play StoreDoes not function
Alipay, WeChat Pay, Didi, AmapWorks

Degraded, which is worse

These are the ones that make you think your laptop is broken. Slack, Notion, Figma, Linear, GitHub, Atlassian and similar tools are not systematically blocked, but they are not reliable either. They load, then a websocket dies, then a file upload stalls at 90 percent, then a page half-renders because an asset came from a blocked content delivery network.

Works well enough to keep trying, badly enough to lose an afternoon

Microsoft, and mystery failures

Microsoft services are generally more usable than Google, but not clean. Outlook web access, Teams calls and OneDrive syncing all vary by day and by network. Anything with a Google font, a Google bot check, a Stripe element or a Cloudflare challenge that resolves badly will show up as a mystery.

The site is not blocked. One of its dependencies is.

Apple is a mixed picture

Apple iCloud services are a mixed picture. Mainland iCloud accounts are operated domestically under a different entity, and some Apple services behave differently on a Chinese network even for a foreign account.

Applies even to a foreign account

App stores

The Chinese Apple App Store is a separate storefront tied to the account region, and many foreign apps are simply absent from it. VPN app listings in particular have been removed from the Chinese storefront for years. The Google Play Store does not function on the mainland, so an Android phone that relies on Play has no way to install anything new.

Sideloading needs a file you can only fetch from a working connection

Steps 01 to 05, before departure

The one thing this guide exists to say

Install and test your VPN before you fly.

Not because it is more convenient. Because the tools you would use to fix the problem from inside China are part of the problem. VPN provider websites are blocked. VPN app store listings are removed or unreachable. Download mirrors get taken offline. Payment pages sometimes fail because a card verification step routes through a blocked service.

The failure mode is the same every time. Someone lands, opens a laptop in the hotel, discovers Google is gone, searches for a VPN using Bing, which mostly still works, finds a provider, clicks download, and the download does not start because the domain is blocked. Now they are asking a friend in another country to email them an installer, and hoping the email service they are using is reachable.

So, before departure, in this order:

  1. Install the client on every device you are bringing. Laptop and phone at minimum.
  2. Sign in and confirm the account is active. Do not leave a login for later.
  3. Connect once. Load something that is blocked in China, to prove the tunnel carries real traffic.
  4. Save your download links, your account email and your password somewhere reachable offline. Not in a note that lives only in a blocked cloud service.
  5. Check what your two-factor authentication depends on. This is covered below and it is the mistake that costs people access to their own accounts.

Day zero

Arrival checklist, day zero

The stretch between the aircraft door and the hotel is where people discover they have no connection at all.

Travellers crossing a wide, bright arrivals hall at an Asian international airport.
CC BY 2.0

Before the plane doors open

Turn the tunnel on while you still have a connection

Turn on your VPN client while you still have roaming or airport wifi, so the first connection attempt does not happen while you are also trying to find the taxi rank.

  • Airport wifi in China usually requires a Chinese phone number for the SMS code that unlocks it
  • With no Chinese SIM and no roaming plan, assume no connection between the aircraft and your hotel
  • Download your offline maps, your hotel address in Chinese characters and your ride-hailing app before you fly

SIM

A domestic SIM from China Mobile, China Unicom or China Telecom gives you data at local prices and requires passport registration, which is standard and takes a few minutes at an operator shop. Your foreign roaming SIM is the alternative, and behaves differently in a way that matters.

See the next section

Ride hailing

Didi has an English interface and accepts foreign cards. It is the practical way to get anywhere without a language argument.

Install it before you land

Maps

Google Maps is blocked and its Chinese data is poor anyway. Apple Maps works and uses local mapping data. Amap and Baidu Maps are what everyone here actually uses, and Amap has usable English.

Amap, Baidu Maps, Apple Maps

Test everything in the hotel, that evening

Do not discover on Monday morning that your work tooling does not come up. Test the tunnel, test your video call platform, test your bank login, test the thing you actually need.

Day zero, not day one

Roaming

Roaming and eSIM versus a VPN

This deserves an honest section, because it is real and most VPN sites will not tell you.

When you roam on a foreign SIM in China, your data is often carried back to your home carrier's network before it reaches the internet. Your traffic exits in your home country, not in China, so the GFW never inspects it. Google works. WhatsApp works. Nothing is installed. Many travellers who report that "the internet was fine in China" were roaming and never knew why.

The same applies to many travel eSIMs, which are essentially roaming products, though not all of them. Some route locally, in which case you get the ordinary filtered Chinese internet and the product will rarely say so in advance.

Where it holds up

  • A short trip, a few days, mostly messaging and email
  • A backup path when your primary connection is having a bad day
  • The immediate arrival window, before you have a local SIM

Where it does not

  • Cost. Roaming data at working volumes is expensive, and video calls and file syncing burn through allowances quickly. Some plans throttle sharply after a small quota.
  • Reliability. Which foreign carrier you attach to on arrival is not your choice, roaming agreements change, and behaviour differs between provinces. It has worked and then stopped working mid-trip.
  • Tethering. Your laptop is the device that needs unfiltered access, and tethering through a roaming phone is where quotas and throttling hurt most.
  • Speed. Backhauling every packet to Europe or North America adds real latency, on top of a mobile connection.

The reasonable position: use roaming as your arrival buffer and your fallback. Do not build a working month on it. If you are staying longer than a week or working while you are here, get a local SIM for cheap fast domestic data and run a tunnel over it for the foreign services.

Money

Payments and daily life

This has genuinely improved, and older guides are wrong about it.

A covered street market in China, vegetable stalls lining a narrow lane with shoppers walking through.
CC BY 2.0

Paying for things

Alipay and WeChat Pay now accept foreign cards

Both accept Visa, Mastercard and others directly in the app, with passport identity verification. You install one before you fly, add your card, verify, and you can pay by QR code the way everyone here does. Alipay has the better English interface and a tourist section that bundles transport cards and ride hailing.

  • Alipay or WeChat, both with a card added and identity verified
  • Didi for taxis, Amap for maps
  • Meituan or Ele.me for food delivery, though these are harder without a Chinese number
  • Trip.com for trains and flights, which handles foreign passports better than the domestic railway app

Cash is marginal, foreign card terminals are unreliable

Legally, cash must be accepted. In practice many small vendors have no float and will look at a hundred yuan note with dismay. Foreign card terminals exist in hotels and international chains and almost nowhere else.

Plan on QR payment

What still fails

Some services still reject foreign cards at the payment step even inside Alipay, typically train ticket bookings, certain government-adjacent services, and some real-name verified platforms. Some platforms require a Chinese national identity number that a foreigner cannot supply. Bank transfers to and from a foreign account remain slow and paperwork heavy.

Passport verification is accepted in more places than a year ago, but not everywhere

Why you still need Western connectivity anyway

Payments being solved does not solve work. Your email, your calendar, your team chat, your code repository, your customer dashboards, your bank at home and your two-factor codes are all on the wrong side of the filter.

Paying for lunch is a solved problem. Doing your job is not.

Mistakes

The mistakes that cost people their first week

Six of them, in the order they tend to bite.

Free VPNs

A free VPN is a business that has to make money some other way, which means selling traffic data, injecting advertising, or renting your connection out as an exit for someone else's traffic. On top of that, the free services are the most heavily blocked, because they are the most used and the easiest to identify.

You will spend your evenings reconnecting

Trusting hotel wifi

Hotel networks in China are filtered like everything else, are frequently and openly monitored, and some hotel networks actively interfere with tunnelled traffic. Treat hotel wifi as transport, nothing more.

A tunnel over hotel wifi is fine. Unprotected banking over it is not.

Leaving two-factor authentication on a blocked app

This is the one that turns an annoyance into a crisis. If your login codes arrive by WhatsApp, or through a Google prompt, or from an authenticator app whose sync service is blocked, you can be locked out of your own accounts on your first night. Before you fly, move your critical two-factor codes to an offline authenticator app that generates codes on the device with no network, and print or securely store your backup codes.

SMS to a foreign number in China is usually delivered, but not always promptly

Not testing before departure

Installing is not testing. Sign in, connect, and load something that is blocked in China. An installed client that has never authenticated is not a working connection.

Step 03 of the checklist above

Routing everything through the tunnel

Chinese services are hosted in China. Sending Taobao, Bilibili, your food delivery and your Chinese bank through a foreign server makes them slow, and some will refuse to work from a foreign address. Split tunnelling sends domestic traffic direct and only tunnels what needs it.

The largest single speed improvement available to you, and most people never turn it on

Assuming last year's information holds

The blocklist is not static. It tightens around political anniversaries and major meetings, protocols that worked for years get detected, and individual servers are burned continuously. Anything you read about China's internet, including this page, has a shelf life.

Choose a setup that can move when things change

Questions

Asked on the way to the airport

Can I install a VPN once I have landed?

Plan on no. The tools you would use to fix the problem from inside China are part of the problem. VPN provider websites are blocked, VPN app store listings are removed or unreachable, download mirrors get taken offline, and payment pages sometimes fail because a card verification step routes through a blocked service.

My friend said the internet was fine in China. Was she wrong?

She was probably roaming. On a foreign SIM your data is often carried back to your home carrier's network before it reaches the internet, so your traffic exits in your home country and the GFW never inspects it. Many travellers who report that the internet was fine were roaming and never knew why.

Is a travel eSIM the same thing as roaming?

Many travel eSIMs are essentially roaming products, but not all of them. Some route locally, in which case you get the ordinary filtered Chinese internet, and the product will rarely say so in advance.

Do I need a Chinese phone number for airport wifi?

Usually yes. Airport wifi in China generally requires a Chinese phone number for the SMS code that unlocks it. If you have not arranged a Chinese SIM or a roaming plan, assume you will have no connection between the aircraft and your hotel.

Can I pay with a foreign card?

Inside Alipay and WeChat Pay, yes. Both accept Visa, Mastercard and others directly in the app, with passport identity verification. Foreign card terminals exist in hotels and international chains and almost nowhere else, and some services still reject foreign cards at the payment step, typically train ticket bookings and certain government-adjacent services.

Is a free VPN good enough for a short trip?

A free VPN is a business that has to make money some other way, which means selling traffic data, injecting advertising, or renting your connection out as an exit for someone else's traffic. The free services are also the most heavily blocked, because they are the most used and the easiest to identify.

Should I send all my traffic through the tunnel?

No. Chinese services are hosted in China, so sending Taobao, Bilibili, your food delivery and your Chinese bank through a foreign server makes them slow, and some will refuse to work from a foreign address. Split tunnelling sends domestic traffic direct and only tunnels what needs it.

Will this page still be right next year?

Partly, at best. The blocklist is not static: it tightens around political anniversaries and major meetings, protocols that worked for years get detected, and individual servers are burned continuously. Anything you read about China's internet, including this page, has a shelf life.

In short: install before you fly. Test before you fly. Fix your two-factor authentication before you fly. Get a local SIM for cheap domestic data, tunnel only the traffic that needs it, and keep roaming in reserve as a fallback. Everything else is detail.

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