No need. Shenzhen is probably the most VPN'ed city in China. Most of companies/universities have VPN connection(like the one i am using now...)

I was reading on Hacker News several years ago that the Chinese government was slowly winning the war on the VPNs. What's the story lately?

While it's purely anecdotical, in my experience vpns are blocked differently depending on where you are. It seems that vpns always work better in Shenzhen...

Maybe they figure people closer to HK are more aware of what goes on on the outside anyway, so they don't put in the effort to block?

No idea if this is practical, but I wonder people living on either side of the river could set up some kind of laser-based point-to-point pipe that would be nearly undetectable unless you knew exactly where it was?

it might be easier to have some sort of point to point packet radio setup. Wouldn't be as fast, but would probably be more reliable and the infrastructure/tooling is already in place to do this.

There is, of course, a wide range of commercially available wireless ISP hardware, most of it made right there in China. It would be easy to set up many gigabit links.

But it’s very easy to detect and home in on radios and the government wouldn’t take kindly to it. Lasers have the advantage that they are hard to detect if you’re not in the beam.

Would love to see drone usage for sly data transfer here.

Nothing sly about drones - the area around the river is open on both sides, especially the HK side which is grass for easy observation of people trying to cross illegally (setup decades ago).

More sly would be people using OpenGarden to create a community linked by across the 'air gap' of river by powerful hubs on HK side and SZ side. That might actually work.