If you’re in China and want to access some of the world’s most popular websites, it’s important to be aware of the ways in which the country’s censors can block access. Here are a few tips to help you check whether sites are being blocked:
- Use a VPN service: A VPN encrypts your traffic and helps you stay anonymous online. This can help you avoid government censorship and other online restrictions.
- Check site availability: Make sure that all of your favorite websites are available when you’re in China. This way, you’ll be able to explore the country without fear of being blocked.
- Use an app: If you’re not comfortable using a website or app directly, consider using a VPN or an app that allows for Chinese censorship-free access.
What You Need to Know
So what’s the problem with using these tools? Well, there are a few problems, but the most important one is that the sites that are and aren’t blocked are constantly changing. Whether this is because some official has changed their mind about what’s allowed, or because some shadowy algorithm has given the green light on a web page, is unclear.
The upshot is that the only way to find out for sure whether a site is accessible from the People’s Republic is to go there and check for yourself.
Using Blocked Website Lists
Of course, if you want to save yourself the cost of a plane ticket, the easiest way to find out whether or not a site you like is blocked in China is by checking it against a few lists. Our favorite is the one that Wikipedia has, since it’s updated often, but there are also a few others.
This Chinese travel website has one as well, for instance. A quick check shows that it gets regular updates, although not quite as often as the Wikipedia one. In both cases, these lists are a great way to get a general idea of which sites are blocked and which aren’t, although they probably don’t keep track of every little change to the Communist Party’s digital whims.
What About “Checker” Websites?
If you’d like to have an option that reflects real-time changes, then a “checker” tool like the one that VPNMentor has, or the one at chinafirewalltest.com, might be a good option. Even China’s top search engine, Baidu, has one, although there’s no English version of it.
Whichever one you choose, you can just input the address of a site (like, say, facebook.com), and it will tell you whether or not it can be accessed from the Middle Kingdom.
These site checkers seem to run your request through five different servers scattered throughout China.
According to Lisa, a member of VPNMentor’s research team, sometimes a site will be blocked by one server but not by the others. She and her team are stumped on why this is, and we couldn’t find a reason, either. One possibility is that server information updates irregularly across China, but that’s a guess, at best.
Overall, these checker sites offer pretty good information, seeing as how they use actual live servers in China to run your query. However, we wouldn’t bank too much on them, either: The rules for what’s allowed and what’s not change a lot, so your results on one day may not be valid the next.
Using a VPN Server in China
A third option we looked at was using a VPN to pretend like we were in China. A virtual private network is able to place you anywhere in the world where it has servers, allowing you to use the internet as if you were in that country. They’re used by people all over the world to circumvent censorship. Theoretically, there’s nothing preventing us from tunneling into the Chinese internet.
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However, one problem is that very few VPNs offer servers in China: A tightly regulated internet isn’t a big draw for most people on the web, especially considering that most Chinese content is freely accessible from everywhere else. The Great Firewall keeps people in, not out.
The only big-name VPN services that currently offer Chinese IP addresses are HideMyAss and Hotspot Shield. Both are decent enough services, but their Chinese servers disappointed a little. For example, we connected with Hotspot Shield to a server that gave us a Chinese IP address, but when we tested whether we could access Netflix—which is banned in the People’s Republic—we got the page for Netflix Japan.
We suspect that Hotspot Shield was using a virtual server—which spoofs an IP address without being there—but it was detected by the Chinese authorities. Such being the case, we recommend against using a VPN to check whether or not a site is accessible in China.
Why Check Whether a Site Is Blocked?
Of course, you might wonder whether it’s even necessary to check whether a site is blocked in China: Even if one site that you like is freely accessible, chances are that another isn’t. Therefore, if you’re going to China, we recommend that you worry less about whether or not you can access your favorite sites and more about getting the right VPN so that you can use the internet from China free of restrictions.
Our favorite VPN for China is ExpressVPN, although there are several others to choose from. In fact, you may want to install two VPNs before you go, just in case one of them gets blocked. In China, it pays to stay safe.
