Maybe I'm just not good enough to notice that I've long been pwned, but unless you are a high-profile target I don't think you need to worry too much.

When I went to China, I made sure to put all the "suspicious" stuff (like a complete Wikipedia dump) on a hidden and encrypted partition of my portable drive and worried that it might be discovered anyway. In the end nobody even looked at it, the English Wikipedia isn't blocked at all, and the Great Firewall is trivial to circumvent with the right VPN subscription.

> the Great Firewall is trivial to circumvent with the right VPN subscription.

We tried this for a few months. We would subscribe to a VPN that worked, we paid our yearly fee, and it stopped working the next month. We did this a few times before finally giving up, it is far from trivial, the GFW is real.

And, at least two years ago, could be trivially worked around if you bought appropriate SIM cards in Hong Kong, which - apparently completely legally, and with cooperation of one of China's telcos - gave you completely unfiltered access in the Shenzhen area.

Sadly, I learned about this only a month into my stay in Shenzhen; before, I was playing the BPN cat&mouse game.

China seems to have a weird dual stance about GFW. I even heard rumors that companies could pay someone to get a legal, unfiltered link.

A hong kong SIM wouldn't work well in Beijing. Also, I noticed hotels in Guangzhou had GFW-free internet, something that would never happen in Beijing or Shanghai.

I've always been surprised by how decent the internet is in Shenzhen most of the time, but I have still had a lot of blocking on some trips. I barely used my VPN on my last trip because nothing I used was blocked. This hasn't been the case when I've even been in neighbouring cities like Dongguan or Zhongshan.

You can get Hong Kong SIMs that have data plans that can be used on the mainland without extra roaming fees. They're more expensive than regular data plans.

Companies in China definitely can pay to get a fast VPN to get unfiltered access. Especially western companies & tech companies do this as you really need unfiltered internet access to do any productive development (an even for non developers, management is using tons of web tools hosted outside of China so they also need VPN to be able to do their work).

This is still an option, and last time I was passing through the HK airport I noticed that a shop next to immigration was selling very reasonably priced data bundles with that kind of dual-network SIM. Highly recommended for those who only stay for a week or two.

I have been using ExpressVPN for the past year (just renewed my subscription) and although throughput sometimes drops to abysmally slow levels, it has never completely stopped working for me.

It has for friends of mine in SH to the point they had to switch to other companies until EV engineers caught up with new restrictions.

> the Great Firewall is trivial to circumvent with the right VPN subscription.

Not true. The Chinese government is cracking down on VPN providers and you can go to jail for 5 years and have to pay very high fees for running a VPN service.

And the Great Firewall is becoming more clever, they are probably using some learning algorithms as often you buy a VPN subscription which works great but it usually gets shut down in couple of weeks or months at the most.

In order to circumvent the firewall you will need to keep switching VPNs a lot and even then it's quite flaky.

> you can go to jail for 5 years and have to pay very high fees for running a VPN service.

To clarity this, only VPN providers within China mainland is subject to this. VPN users are safe, for now.

I suspect there's some outsider effect happening here (basically, you're not using the right VPN providers).

Plenty of tech companies use a companywide VPN for a variety of reasons.

not true, it becomes harder and harder to pass through the GFW.