I keep contact with a girl in China and from her reports using VPNs is kinda common for young people with college education. She would do it sometimes to access YouTube, and would laugh it off when I would say she should be careful doing such things.

I suppose for the government, as long as it isn’t the majority of people doing something that would cause trouble, it isn’t worth tracking down all things, as expected.

This is intentional; "Oh it's not authoritarian/bad, people use VPNs all the time and get away with it".

Except for that muslim chick another commenter pointed out, or anyone else the party decides is undesirable.

fwiw work has a subsidiary in china, which also has a (i assume permitted) VPN back to the mothership and it's so godawful slow and unreliable it makes the south american VPNs look like fiber internet in comparison. you're literally going to have trouble keeping a TCP connection open for longer than 10 minutes and throughput is reasonably measured in kilobit/s. major chinese city.

i imagine the chinese intranet is reasonably quick and the interconnection to the internet is just intentionally ultra-bottlenecked.

Just be prepared to spend a year or two in prison if relations between your country and China worsen and they need a hostage.

Like the executive from Huawei who was imprisoned in Canada

s/Huawei/Chinese State Security/

She was a spy--look at how intense their reaction was.

Unfortunately, they tend to grab innocents to exchange for captured spies. However, they're going to go for big fish, not little ones. As an average joe I'm not concerned about being held for a spy swap, but if I were a highly placed executive there's no way I would set foot in China.

It's time for the West to stop playing around and allowing this sort of hostage taking. If China and Russia want to play dirty, play dirty back. They take a hostage, start taking their nationals hostage and plant large quantities of fentanyl on them.

Meng was PRC royalty - the daughter of Huawei's president, imagine a literal billionaire being a spy. She was taken hostage under Pence's China Initative for Iranian sanctions shenanigans that historically was dealt via fines. The initiative explicitly called for targetting PRC nationals.

Hence intense reaction. The 2 Canadian Michaels on the other hand, were text book spys with NGO covers. Western propaganda likes insinuate PRC would capture innocent westerners when state security have massive state survillance capability that completely dismantled CIA networks a few years prior. Like literally friend of Michael hinted he was in "intelligence" and CSIS (Canadian CIA) publically celebrated on twitter upon their return. The Michaels weren't executives. The TLDR, while in PRC, don't traffic drugs, don't be a spy/do anti state activities, don't get involved in expensive legal proceedings - the latter is what actually get (white) westerners in trouble via exit bans.

Do you have any proof she was a spy? She absolutely was not. An extremely high ranking executive of one of the largest technology companies on earth would be literally the worst possible choice for a spy.