This is the reason I no longer work from Shanghai. Attempting to do anything in the tech spave while constantly playing cat and mouse got to be such a productivity killer that it was becoming impossible to work. You'd rarely know if failures were because of some Firewall nonsense or something else.
It's a tragedy really. I am one guy, but I've since hired several developers and my little company is gaining traction -- we would have been happy to expand our footprint into China in terms of hiring a Shanghai Dev team; yet with the variable and unknown stability of our connections, it was too big of a risk, considering we can operate in Europe and the U.S. with minimal interference.
I was in Shanghai last month & in previous years bypassing the firewall was not too much of a hassle. When I arrived in Shanghai for the holidays this year my old VPN provider didn't work anymore, plus they added DNS poisoning and bandwidth throttling. I actually upgraded TO StrongVPN, which seems to be one of the affected VPN services now.
My conclusion was that it has become effectively impossible to run a western IT-oriented business from Shanghai. Would be interested in hearing stories of people who DO succeed.
Sad thing is that all the infrastructure is in place: plenty of fast finer in the big cities & the "local", balkanised version of the "internet" works fine.
Sorry but aren't you better off with a DO VPS running an OpenVPN?
I mean using a VPN service or Tor public server is like weaving a banner saying Hey I'm trying to bypass you!.
I was able to browse the internet connecting through my home's OpenVPN (DDNS and all) when I was in China (for vacations mostly and some work) without any problems.
Of course a home ADSL pipe is good only for 'www' and maybe not even for that, but now a VPS costs ~ 10 USD per month and has enough bandwidth for most people.
This is exactly what I do, except that I'm using the $5/month droplet from DO, although I don't live in China (currently in Oman), and the censorship here isn't no where near as bad.
Uhm, many of the larger companies have direct connections out of China that don't cross the GFW, even Chinese companies. If you are important and rich enough...
Yep, as always money buys everything in China. I was wondering how the smaller indie IT people do it though: to me it just seems like a cat-and-mouse game not worth the effort.
the DNS poisoning is annoying. I'm on the receiving end of 200 requests per second from people who think I'm facebook, bittorrent trackers, various porn sites.
I finally blocked port 80 for lots of chinese IP blocks.
You are not alone. According to reports, many IT businesses relying on stable internet connection have moved away from China Mainland to other countries of Asia like Singapore.
The problem is, government doesn't actually care. They see political stability as the top priority. To achieve it, they are willing to sacrifice foreign business chances.
So true. Communication communication communication.
1. They don't have internet. They have something like an intranet. If you want to use baidu or oder on taobao, it will work.
2. Phone calls. Forget skype or VOIP. Make a big down payment on you phone for international calls and you can call abroad. Kind of.
3. Postal mail. Good luck relying on that, especially from mail abroad. Best chances to use an express service (Fedex etc.) and pay the price.
It's a tragedy really. I am one guy, but I've since hired several developers and my little company is gaining traction -- we would have been happy to expand our footprint into China in terms of hiring a Shanghai Dev team; yet with the variable and unknown stability of our connections, it was too big of a risk, considering we can operate in Europe and the U.S. with minimal interference.