It is not easy. One day your VPN stops working, and you need to ask your friends for a new recommendation, and maybe they have if theirs didn't start failing last month, and set that up and hopefully it keeps working for a while longer, maybe until your original routes around the issue. It is high friction, and was a constant pain trying to maintain a functioning satellite office behind the Great Firewall.

That was the case when I was living there, but I've read a lot of people saying that VPNs aren't nearly as effective any more.

My experiences before was that they were doing some machine learning to detect my socks proxy and slow it down eventually. Last visit I went to China a few months ago I found my Wireguard VPN running at full speed.

Either technology has improved or they stopped trying as hard, which makes sense now that the local internet economy has matured.

I was never good at VPNs. We would find one that worked, they wanted a one year subscription up front and...then they would stop working. I assume most VPNs in China are just a scam to make some shady money. Who are you going to complain to, the Chinese government?

China would try to block them so you had to find new alternatives. I used one for years that stayed up, but yes it was often frustratingly slow. You had to really make an effort, and most people aren't going to do that, and then there's the language barrier.

Every Chinese person a Westerner may talk to has a VPN, but you can't compete with Chinese-owned social media without the other 90% of the population. Also, China has been very aggressive with VPN throttling and random outages, since the pandemic.

depends on time and place. its true that now there is less dependence on foreign internet and you can now be fully decoupled from english internet with the number of domestic apps. most people only use a VPN now just to access email (e.g. gmail, university), if they even need to at all. and yeah, if youre in beijing during a congress, then VPNs will be slow. but its trivial to set up and use a VPN, even my 88 year old grandma has one.

I promise you Uyghur muslims don't all have VPNs installed on their phones. That alone will get you disappeared into a prison camp.

"Every Han Chinese of a certain background" is the more accurate reference.

If you try and operative a service that relies on frictionless access by saying your users have to fly abroad to download it, and use an illegal and increasingly spotting VPN service to access it, it's banned. You simply cannot succeed under these conditions.

this was never the case and is even less so now.

the vast majority of the population cannot easily use a VPN, especially not on their phone which many people use instead of a PC