Use at Your Own Risk

Using a VPN is a simple way to protect your private data on unsecured networks, make it harder for your data to be monitored by your ISP, and to make it harder for advertisers to track you online. VPNs have also been used to circumvent government censorship, which can have high stakes in China. We’ll explain the issues and look at which providers offer VPN servers in the country. 

Behind the Great Firewall

China keeps a tight hold on communications in the region. Sites and services are sometimes blocked, preventing anyone within the country from accessing them. The main tool for this filtering is the so-called Great Firewall of China. 

While we know that a VPN is a useful privacy tool, we don’t know what—if any—repercussions you stand to take from using a VPN. It is worth noting that the Chinese government has a history of dealing harshly with internal critics. 

Will a VPN Keep You Safe in China?

The short answer is that we don’t know whether a VPN can protect you in China. When confronted with a well-funded and state-backed organization that’s determined to monitor your communications, it’s not likely you will be able to completely hide your activities. Which is why we stress: using a VPN in any region with repressive policies could put you in danger.

We also don’t know if a given VPN will work in China because PCMag does not have the ability to test in the region. In order to assemble this list, we looked through our top-rated services and singled out the ones that maintain servers in China or Hong Kong. These are not VPNs guaranteed to work or protect you in the region. In fact, elsewhere we’ve gone into great detail on why we’re not picking a specific VPN as our top choice for use in China.

When it comes to operating in China, some VPN providers offer additional tools. Some companies offer specialized servers for the region, designed to be accessible and secure. Some companies include a stealth or obfuscation mode in their apps, which disguises VPN traffic as HTTPS traffic, making it harder to identify and block. We’ve noted these additional features where available. 

A few VPN services provide access to the Tor anonymization network. When you route your traffic through Tor, it’s much harder to trace back to you and you can access hidden sites on the Tor network. Note that you don’t need a VPN to access Tor—it’s a free service that provides its own tools. It’s unclear to us whether or not Tor is currently accessible within China. 

Similar to Tor are multihop connections. Instead of just going through one VPN server, a multihop connection routes your traffic through two servers. The goal is that even if one of these servers is somehow compromised, your privacy would still be assured. 

How to Circumvent Censorship

The theory works like this: If you’re in a region that censors the internet, you can get around that censorship by using a VPN to connect to a server in a different country. This tunnels your web browsing from your machine to the VPN server, which doesn’t have the censor’s restrictions. 

In practice, it may not be that easy. VPN traffic may be blocked, or it might attract unwanted attention from the authorities—precisely what you’re trying to avoid. 

Note that if you want to access the outside internet from within China, you shouldn’t connect to a VPN server in China. The whole point is to access the internet from somewhere else. Connecting to a VPN server in China does have some uses, for example if you need to communicate locally, or access a service that is only available within the country. It may also offer additional privacy protections, but there’s no way we at PCMag can be certain that it would be effective. 

Is It Worth It?

We sincerely hope that these VPN companies can live up to their word and provide a safe and secure service for people who truly need it, whether they’re looking to keep their communications private from their governments or simply to protect themselves from snoops on an unsecured Wi-Fi network. In the end, however, it’s going to be up to you, the user, to decide if the risks are worth the benefit using a VPN can provide you in China.

In addition to this list of VPNs for China, you can also read our feature on the best VPNs for Hong Kong, if you’re specifically interested in privacy and security in that semi-autonomous city.

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