If you’re traveling to China you have to be prepared that a lot of sites you are using daily might be blocked due to the Great Firewall. Recently I was there on a business trip as a software developer and here are my notes on what works and what doesn’t, including some tips.
What doesn’t work
Google and its services (Gmail, YouTube) are not available. You can use Bing and Yahoo as search engines. I was using Bing. Bing
recognized that I was using English search queries and offered to switch the user interface to English.
Since all of Google’s domains seem to be blocked, web sites referencing Google API JavaScript files, for example StackOverflow, can take a long time to load before a request timeout kicks in and the rest of the site is displayed. One simple workaround is to disable JavaScript in your browser. This works well for sites that don’t depend too much on JavaScript for their content.
WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are not available. Since I don’t use them anyway I didn’t miss them. Some news sites occasionally embed Instagram pictures and Twitter posts in their articles, for example announcements by the US president or similar. You won’t see those either.
What works
Here are some services and websites I was using without problems:
- Skype is working
- TeamViewer is working
- Github is available
- Wikipedia is available (the non-Chinese language versions)
- Amazon is working
There are sites where you can check in advance if your favorite websites are accessible. There’s also an overview with the status of high-ranking websites on Wikipedia.
VPN
Apparently using a VPN is not illegal, but access to a lot of VPN services is blocked. If you want to use a VPN app you should download it before entering the country. I personally didn’t feel the need to use a VPN.
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