> When I travel to China with a mobile phone subscription that supports roaming, I get completely uncensored access to the internet.

This is because when you are roaming, the data traffic goes through an encrypted tunnel to your carrier. There's not much China can do without completely blocking roaming traffic. It's not a big deal though because vast majority of Chinese people don't have access to a foreign mobile line. As long as China can control what 99% of the population can access, it's already a win.

China censors the Internet because it doesn’t want its citizens to receive information from outside or unite together without its control. Censoring foreigners is not useful for either purpose so they don’t bother.

The way international roaming works, is similar to a VPN back to your home cellular network on the back end, this all happens transparently to the user. You can verify this whilst traveling if you browse to any site using IP geolocation, it will think you are in your home country.

> I don't know but this particular case sounds like a very modest fine (200 yuan) for using a VPN and sizeable fine for not reporting (and being taxed on) a foreign income.

I read this kind of comments in mainland's internet forums as well. People opposing this theory said that it should be the national tax authority handling this, not a local police department. Considering the local government did something crazy previously as well (collect fees from local corporations by threatening them), this seems like a problem with the local government instead of a nation-wide thing.

Taxes in China are collected locally. There is no IRS in China, each city (or province? I’ve never worked in a province before) will collect income taxes and then send off a large portion to the central government. Since the central government usually has a huge take on income taxes and VAT, localities are often very starved for funding (they used to make most of their budget via land transfer and development fees).

The rules are foreigners are allowed to use VPNs, and foreign mobile phones aren’t censored at all. Chinese nationals are forbidden from using VPNs, but similarly to how piracy is illegal and can lead to large fines in the US, Some people use VPNs without being caught.

My understanding is that there's is an entirely legal official channel. All the tech companies use that to access GitHub, for example. Likewise for some universities and hotels.

It's an important detail that this guy is using VPN to work from home, not at work for a company.

I lived in China for 9 years and my VPNs were always broken, to the point that I only used Facebook at work (since we had our own line). Most of my foreigner friends were in similar boats, being programmers none of us were technology illiterate.

You can find pirated American TV shows and movies on china’s internal internet. No need for a VPN. Quite the opposite really, it’s much harder to find those things outside of China.