My #China trip report:

I went to China for 4 weeks. Apologies, I was not able to post during that time. I was sucked into a black hole with no connectivity.

I thought I was prepared for the Chinese firewall, I had a good VPN (Express VPN). Online reports as of early August said that the VPN worked in China, but no, it didn't work for a second. I believe is the same for all western VPNs.

The blocking of western websites is worse now than before covid. During my last trip to China in 2019, I was able to use Yahoo email, but it's now blocked. Google Gmail has been blocked for many years now.

During my China trip in 2019, I was able to use my Vietnamese phone number (I'm an expat residing in Vietnam) in roaming mode, I set up the same this time, but didn't work. The phone company in Vietnam said that everything was ok, it should work, but didn't.

It's not easy now for foreigners to get a sim card in China.

I even tried to get WeChat, which is the basic, essential app for communication and payments in China, but foreigners can no longer activate the app. For people that had it from years before, it's ok, but no new activations. I could had it easily in the past, but I didn't since it's basically a tool for surveillance.

Some friends were able to get a Chinese VPN to work in my laptop (difficult to use since they only use Chinese language), but in the end, I could not log in to anything since Twitter, Yahoo mail, etc, detected my location in China and required the sending of a code by email or phone, but since those didn't work either, it was of no use.

A warning for those traveling to China, in most cases, you'll be blocked from the outside world. China has not been foreigner friendly for many years, but it's now getting ridiculously unfriendly. Foreign tourists are going to feel the difference and from what I read in blogs, travelers are basically saying: Don't travel to China unless you have a very good reason.

The only western provider of internet services that still works in China is Microsoft. Microsoft Bing search service works, but the search results are a tiny fraction of what you get outside of China.

The Hotmail / Outlook app from Microsoft works but requires a good internet connection (the quality of the internet connection in China has not improved much in the 21 years that I've been traveling there, it slows down to a crawl when it rains).

Skype, the messaging app from Microsoft works fine, it became my main tool of communication.

My guess as to why Microsoft services have not been blocked, unlike all others, is that China depends on the Windows OS, so they can't bully Microsoft, or Microsoft could easily retaliate by reducing support for Windows and that would be a big problem for China.

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