I just spent 3 months in China this summer. The GFW has become much more sophisticated than I remember. I found only one method that reliably worked. That was to use Holafly (an international eSIM provider) and use its built-in VPN. China largely doesn’t care if foreigners get around the GFW, I guess.

Another method that usually worked was ProtonVPN with protocol set to Wireguard. Not sure why this worked, it’s definitely a lot more detectable than other methods I tried. But as long as I rotated which US server I used every few days, this worked fine.

No luck with shadowsocks, ProtonVPN “stealth” mode, Outline+Digital Ocean, or even Jump / Remote Desktop. Jump worked the longest at several hours before it became unbearably slow, I’m still not sure if I was actually throttled or my home computer started misbehaving.

I didn’t get around to setting up a pure TLS proxy, or proxying traffic through a domain that serves “legitimate” traffic, so no idea if that still works.

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edm0nd 9 days ago | parent | next [-]

Holafly (and other "travel" eSim providers) have been caught routing traffic through China.

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/travel-esims-secretly-route-t...

	▲	jiggawatts 9 days ago \| parent [-]
		That article seems bogus. IP blocks are routinely bought and sold, and hence their geo location database entries are not reliable. If you’re physically in the EU or the UK and your traffic is routed through China it would be unusably slow and immediately noticeable to non-technical users.

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thenthenthen 9 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Exclusively use Shadowsocks here in the mainland. Was surprised to see Ngrok to work as well, but prolly not very long/reliable.

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ghoshbishakh 8 days ago | parent [-]

It is a tunnel, cant be used to browse a site through it isn't it?

	▲	77pt77 8 days ago \| parent [-]
		If you have a working tunnel the rest is trivial.