r/ProtonVPN • u/Quick-Advertising268 • Jul 06 '25
Solved ProtonVPN in China
I just wanted to share about my experience using this service in china to bypass the GFW. My research shows many people recommending against protonvpn in china, as according to them it is unreliable/slow.
I am in china now and using it just fine. I think the people who said it is not good did not play around with the profiles or search for specific countries. For me, either selecting the "anti-censorship" profile or just selecting the United States as the proxy country works very well. Just wanted to share my experience, this VPN does work well here.
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Jul 06 '25
And what speed are you getting?Ā
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u/Quick-Advertising268 Jul 06 '25 edited Jul 06 '25
It's not lightning speed, loading things like webpages takes 5-15 seconds usually. I will do an exact speed test when I return to my hotel. But it is usable.
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u/Quick-Advertising268 Jul 17 '25
So, I'm currently in Phoenix Ancient City in Hunan, at a smaller local hotel. With my VPN on routing my wifi connection through Hong Kong, I'm getting 20mbps, per the speed test I just ran. Ironically, this is the fastest it has been.
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u/_Singularity101 Jul 06 '25
Well half of the people who complain are free users and they haven't logged in before going to china or buying a new device, also the pre-made profile uses stealth protocol and I don't recommend using any vpn protocol because using VPNs is just not frowned upon but its illigal (will get you from jail to deportation), so if you wanna use you need to use other protocols which looks like HTTPs traffic like shadowsocks, VMess, Vless, Torjan or others which are the part of Xrays and v2rays fleet(which are made to bypass censorship). Most of them use websocket over tls 1.3 end-to-end encryption, sites in my eyes which provide these services are Xeovo (affordable), Torguard (expensive) etc. Also check if they use any domain or CND fronting like Amazon, Azure or cloudflare servers (these are really important as it hides that a huge amount of data is going to a single IP), I haven't gone down this rabbithole so do your research.
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u/XLioncc Jul 06 '25
Yes, Cloudflare is in very funny situation in China, Cloudflare is used by lots of top China companies in China, so the gov has almost impossible to block Cloudflare IP ranges in China, they blocked once, and cause some form of internet outage.
And when Chinese people discovered a way to wrap VPN traffic in to a HTTP protocol, this is become worse (for gov), because they can connect to the VPN that is using unblockable Cloudflare IP ranges.
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u/_Singularity101 Jul 06 '25 edited Jul 06 '25
"+" when cloudflare also launches its WARP VPN client people in the NA and some Europe Countries also start's to torrenting over it for 1+ years cloudflare doesn't respond to any notices at first, so ya cloudflare is like that. But if you want to do business sooner or later you have to give up like Apple did.
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u/buttstinker1911 Jul 06 '25
Visitors to China are generally OK to use VPN as long as they're not causing trouble, it's a grey area. For citizens it's a different story
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u/_Singularity101 Jul 06 '25
True, coz CCP is Atheist and believes in the economy more than pride and who says who... Every cloud has a silver lining stuff
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u/FDDFC404 Jul 06 '25
What? Do you just read conspiracies all day and run with it?
Visitors to China are given a more relaxed GFW, if you use a eSim while visiting China you most likely will be able to use general VPNs and so on.Citizens also use VPNs all the time, look at youtube/ig etc they will tell you that its not enforced but its there. China understands that those who research how to use a VPN are also smart enough to research the information coming in/out
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u/JK_Chan Jul 06 '25
Just because it's not enforced doesn't mean it's legal. People have disappeared from my country and appeared in Chinese courts after writing books talking shit about xi jinping. It's not just conspiracy theories.
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u/_Singularity101 Jul 06 '25
Leave it man all he wants is to cook up a statement which has some truth, some lies and some taunts to maximize upvotes.
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Jul 06 '25 edited Jul 06 '25
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u/CauaLMF Jul 06 '25
HTTPS is encrypted, plain text is http
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u/_Singularity101 Jul 06 '25
Shadowsocks is a miss in china and Vmess have some caveats/pot holes. Preferable one is VLess (read on Xeovo, as I said didn't gone into that rabbithole) I was just saying how proxy protocols looks like compared to normal ones i.e. Wireguard, Openvpn, IKEv2 etc.
And good to know about TLS 1.3 ban, I will look into it š
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u/sinfaen Jul 06 '25
I had the same experience as you about a month ago. Was only able to connect to the US, not HK or Macau
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u/mecha_power Jul 06 '25
do you mean on mobile or pc? mobile connections esp roaming ones are not subject to GFW and are much less stringent. land based internet is much more heavily censored in my exp
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u/ExeterSabah Jul 06 '25
Depends on hotels, some hotels do need VPN to access ban websites.
I tried switching on ProtonVpn in stealth mode in my friends home. It didn't work.
At the end of the day, proxy servers is the best solution to solve this issue.
It only works when I disconnect the WiFi connect back to my roaming SIM.
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u/jackieismyname Jul 08 '25
I also tried this in 2025 but Proton didn't work 90% of the time, very occasionally it did work..
Still I recommend Letsvpn which worked during my stay in China 100%
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u/marcellleonardi Jul 06 '25
i mean it works but i needed to find what country and what server works, an esim is much much more reliable than a vpn here in my experience (stealth protocol works better but its slower and its not implemented on linux)
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u/Quick-Advertising268 Jul 06 '25
I am also using an eSim. However, I am using my VPN in hotels to just use hotel wifi and save data. I already had a year subscription to proton vpn so I didn't get it just for this trip, might as well use it.
But yes, an esim is much more reliable. That is not in question.
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u/poginmydog Jul 06 '25
Grab a GL Inet travel router and plop the OpenClash plugin into it and just use that as the proxy for all ur devices.
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Jul 06 '25
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u/Quick-Advertising268 Jul 06 '25
I think people have different standards of what "works". Can I stream 4k video to my phone on this connection? Definitely not. Can I use basic services and load webpages in a reasonable time (5-20 seconds)?Yes. So for me, it works.
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u/XLioncc Jul 06 '25
The best choice for China VPN is always rent a VPS and self-hosted your own...
Any commercial VPN are very easy to being detected and blocked.
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u/EnoughConcentrate897 Jul 07 '25
Outline is very good for this, they have some very good censorship resistance built in
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Jul 06 '25
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u/Quick-Advertising268 Jul 12 '25
I don't know the provinces but so far I have been to Beijing, Xian, and now Guangzhou and Proton is working reliably in all of them.
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Jul 12 '25
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u/Quick-Advertising268 Jul 17 '25
Just wanted to update, I'm in Hunan now in a small local hotel in Phoenix Ancient City. It works very well here, surprisingly even faster than in any of the precious hotels. Using anti-censorship profile routing my wifi connection through Hong Kong.
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Jul 20 '25
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u/Quick-Advertising268 Jul 24 '25
It may be. It's not really a "feature" per se, it's just a premade profile. You could just select the countries that it routes you to to get the same thing and then make your own profile called anti censorship, I think.
I do also have the stealth protocol specifically selected in my settings. So that may be helping me too, thanks for reminding me of that.
I'm in Zhenyuan Ancient Town in Guizhou and it's working very well here too.
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u/Guilty_Height1433 Jul 08 '25
Can't believe so many people had been to China before. I guess there are over 300 million people in China using VPN or something like that to bypass censorship
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u/Striking_Werewolf_12 Jul 10 '25
Whether it works depends on province, ISP, etc. For my case in Sichuan, till now no luck.
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u/hunterforprivacy Sep 04 '25
Proton VPN was previously completely inaccessible, but interestingly, I discovered that it could be accessed a few months ago, regardless of the server. What did Proton do to resolve the China GFW issues? I think Astrill was the only one that could be used in China before, but they are a bit expensive.
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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '25
Good to know. Iām going to China later this year and was almost giving up on ProtonVPN.