Many foreigners have VPNs, but many do not. They aren't the easiest thing to set up, and they often close shop a few weeks after you pay a yearly subscription fee.

Email: I use outlook.com, but I shut my gmail account long before gmail was blocked. I'm weird.

maps: Apple Maps on an iphone works well enough. Not sure if gmaps on Android works or not. Many Google services still work even if a few are blocked.

Browsing: many websites work in China, but I also had full internet access at work for when I needed it, so Facebooking family was easy enough, I just didn't use it at night when I was at home...I didn't miss it.

Its definitely isolating, but not incredibly so. If you are addicted to social media, this can even help you become unaddicted, weird therapy for sure :)

Is VPN legal? What are English options for maps with transit available without vpn?

Apple maps works perfectly fine in China. I’m not sure what it’s like for android users.

It includes transit, at least for Beijing, see https://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability/. I always took a taxi though so that wasn’t very important to me, so I used mostly the didi dache app.

For crying out loud, even using github based services like 'go get' or homebrew without proxies is a real pain in the arse, stop defending your 'it's not that bad' view cos it is.

Please don't cross into flamewar mode. We're trying to avoid that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Get a SIM card from Project Fi (by Google), which auto-VPN's for you, and you can use everything (FB, Twitter, etc.) you're used to using. Bring a Chromebook and use your phone to provide Internet for your Chromebook.

Install Didi so you can hail a ride. Install WeChat and some of the mini apps so that you can order Starbucks without waiting in line. Since you probably don't have a Chinese bank account, find a local (possibly even a hotel concierge) who is willing to take cash from you and send you some RMB into your WeChat account so you can pay vendors, including restaurant bills, train tickets, farmer's markets, and the guy on the street corner selling oranges.

Pretty straight forward.

I spent a couple hours setting up an OpenVPN server on AWS EC2 nano instance so it's going to be completely free for the first year. Speed is not great but enough to watch HD youtube videos, etc. I know have unrestricted internet on both my phone and macbook.

Follow this tutorial: https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/how-to-make-you...

For a long while shadowsocks/shadowsocksr (the latter being more actively developed) has been preferred way to bypass the GFW although what works is constantly changing. This was an interesting write up passed a couple years ago where a dev tries out various methods for bypass on a China trip: http://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewal...

I'm moving to China in a week for graduate school and have been asking myself many of these questions :)

In past trips to China, VPN services--specially Express VPN--allowed me to easily bypass the Great Firewall. That unlocks Twitter, FB, Google services, etc.

That being said, many services don't have a great experience in China. For example, Google Maps doesn't offer public transit or driving instructions. In these cases, using the chinese-based app (Du Maps) is just far better.

Some options:

>> ExpressVPN worked well on windows, although flakey for me on Android.

>> Set up ShadowSocks on a server outside China.

>> Buy a SIM card in Hong Kong, they apparently maintain their unrestricted internet access even in the mainland.

VPN or V2RAY etc. Fix that issue. It's still excruciatingly slow tho.