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.

Last month I visited Beijing, China and had to work remotely during my trip. At work we rely on a number of Google services, so I needed a reliable way to circumvent the Great Firewall of China (GFW). After doing a decent amount of research, I learned that just running a SOCKS proxy via SSH is likely to run into problems, so I used a couple of commercial VPNs, as well as a private Shadowsocks server I had set up on various ports of a Digital Ocean droplet. The idea being to have a couple of fall-back methods to tunnel through the GFW in case my primary one stopped working. I thought it might be useful to report on what worked well, and what was most challenging about this.

Given that I’m a Linux user and needed solutions that were Linux-friendly, I settled on two highly recommended commercial VPNs – ExpressVPN and Astrill. I also sprung for the added “VIP” add-on to Astrill that gives you access to a few additional VPN endpoints that presumably have lower utilization. In summary, Astrill was the clear winner, especially with the VIP add-on. Though no matter which VPN service I was using, there was a lot of fiddling that had to be done to test the latency of different proxy endpoints. There wasn’t one I could just set and forget.

Finding usable wifi in Beijing is another story, and proved to be a frustrating problem. My local resident friend told me that the Chinese tend to use the internet for recreation rather than getting work done, so the vast majority of folks packed in coffee shops are streaming video to watch movies or TV shows. My own observations backed this up, and it was easy to notice this, as a sizable proportion of these folks don’t bother to use headphones when watching their entertainment (grumble). So I found the only times I had really solid wifi speeds were when I found a coffee shop that was mostly empty, and probably half the time I gave up on the wifi and just tethered to my phone’s data connection. For most of my work I was running remote builds over SSH, and I found my phone’s data connection was laggy in a more consistent way than when I tried to use wifi in a busy cafe.

Regarding SIM cards in China, I have some tips to share as well. I ended up buying a prepaid China Unicom SIM with 2 GB of data from Amazon before I left for my trip, which was incredibly convenient. The way this works is you buy the SIM online, they send it to you, and you have to activate it over email with the seller. Once the SIM is activated, the 90-day lifetime of the SIM doesn’t start until you actually begin to use it, so you can complete the activation well before your trip and then pop the SIM card into your phone once you land in China. I have no complaints about dealing with the seller LvyCom on Amazon and would definitely recommend them.

So how was ExpressVPN? Decent and reliable, but not especially fast. I found it helped significantly to change the connection type from “auto” to “udp”, but Astrill’s Openweb connection type still beat it when it came to speeds. But to set expectations – generally the speeds were still slow. My friend had an 80 Mbit home internet connection which I tested without the VPN enabled, but once I enabled a VPN, the best I could get from it was around 3-5 Mbit. This was generally only good enough to watch YouTube videos at 480p. My friend was quite surprised when I told him I always watch YouTube at home at 1080p resolution with no hiccups or delays.

Shadowsocks turned out to be the least reliable method of tunneling out of China, sometimes working well and sometimes not working at all. Since it’s a lot of extra effort to set up a Shadowsocks server compared to just using a commercial VPN, I don’t think it’s necessary unless you want to have that extra peace of mind.

Overall I was able to get work done while in China, but it was regularly a frustrating experience to deal with the lack of bandwidth and annoying latency on SSH terminal sessions. Oh, and bring good headphones if you plan to try to work from coffee shops!

Photos from my recent trip to Beijing can be found here. For news about the GFW and VPNs, I recommend greatfire.org.

This blog post on Wired provides insight into the processes Hushmail uses to comply with court orders. Anyone with a Hushmail account – or users of similar privacy enforcement services – should read this article carefully. It turns out that a convenience feature of Hushmail has enabled the company to turn over unencrypted emails from users who take advantage of this “feature.” I agree with the author of the article that Hushmail should be praised for being so open regarding what is going on. Yet at the same time you have to wonder what other flaws may exist with other services that haven’t been revealed.

I’m not much of a paranoid, tinfoil-hat type, but I do encourage people to make use of privacy-enhancing services like Hushmail, in the hopes they will become more mainstream. I do this based on the philosophy that one’s right to privacy and security is only worth something when people choose to exercise those rights.