ZenLinux Blog

I returned to China during a three country East-Asia trip this Spring, and thought I’d share some more notes on being able to work remotely while in China. Some things worth sharing have changed since my last blog post on the topic in 2016.

One thing that’s interesting about the Great Firewall (GFW) is that China uses it for censorship of its mainland residents, but doesn’t do so for residents of Hong Kong, even though many of the same Chinese telecoms offer services there. I’ve heard that if you buy a prepaid sim card in Hong Kong, and use it in mainland China, your cell data service is not blocked by the GFW. So I was going to buy a prepaid Hong Kong sim before my trip until I learned that you can also buy sim cards from foreign providers that can work at 4G speeds in roaming mode in multiple countries. As I was traveling to Japan, Korea, and China, I started looking for a single sim solution that would work in all three countries.

What I found (and which worked flawlessly) was the AIS sim2fly prepaid sim card, which you can buy on Amazon. AIS is one of the biggest telecom companies in Thailand, and they claimed that these cards worked at full 4G speeds in roaming mode in several Asian countries, and that the service was not blocked by the GFW when used in China. They offer an 8-day prepaid sim with 6 GB of data (tethering supported), which was more than enough data for me. I ended up buying a few of these, so that after 8 days I simply popped in a new sim card and I was good to go for another 8 days. On top of that, using these sim cards was cheaper than if I were to have bought separate sim cards for Japan, Korea, and China. I’d highly recommend the AIS sim2fly prepaid sims for these kinds of trips.

As for the times I had to use a VPN over wifi, I did some more research and learned that Astrill is still a reliable provider. As of late, ExpressVPN seems to have become mostly unusable in China based on my research, though I didn’t try to use it personally during this trip. Anytime I had to use Astrill (which I typically used in their Wireguard mode), my speeds were extremely slow (1-2 Mbps) compared to what I’d get tethered to my smartphone AIS connection. Also my VPN would disconnect at random times – sometimes it would work reliably for a half-hour or more, and other times it would disconnect every few minutes. So my advice is if you don’t need to stream a lot of data, it would be far more convenient to rely entirely on smartphone tethering for your internet needs, assuming you’ve got good cell data coverage in the area you’ll be visiting. For any major city in China, this will be a non-issue.

An unrelated observation I had while in Beijing was that none of the locals used cash – everyone paid for things using WeChat Pay.
Unfortunately, you can’t link a foreign debit card to your WeChat Pay account – it only works with cards issued by Chinese banks.
So I was often the annoying foreigner who paid for things with cash. At one bakery, they even refused to break a 100 RMB note (worth around $14 USD) because they didn’t have enough change in their register. Being able to use WeChat pay unlocks a lot of other conveniences you can use in China, such as Didi (their equivalent of Lyft/Uber) rideshare payments, bike rentals, etc. So if you’re going to be in China for a long time (e.g, over a month), it may be worth the effort to open a Chinese bank account and keep a small amount of money in it for use with WeChat Pay.