Travelling in China is a headache for foreigners, and the Great Firewall is making everything worse
'Beijing huanying ni' feels a long time ago
A friend recently travelled from Hong Kong to mainland China for a business trip, and their experience was characteristic of what I’ve heard from a lot of people (both Hong Kongers and foreigners) transiting across the Great Firewall.
China’s internet has always been cut off from the wider global web: the “Splinternet” has essentially existed since Google was forced out of China and Baidu rose in its place. But the degree to which the inter-GFW and outer-GFW nets are different is now on another level: a traveller to China must download alternate apps for payment, maps, messaging, transit, and a host of WeChat mini-programs for dealing with restaurants, hotels, and other businesses. Often this involves handing over reams of personal data, from phone numbers to passport or HKID details. Entering lots of venues requires consenting to ubiquitous facial recognition scans.
This is already a headache before the traveller discovers that many businesses in China don’t seem to want you there: hotels that refuse foreign guests (a category that includes Hong Kongers, despite “one country, two systems”), venues that require ID but aren’t set up to accept passports, apps that can’t handle foreign payment cards. An American friend was recently turned away from a tourist attraction in Zhejiang province because they didn’t allow foreigners — to see some historical buildings. Many road signs in Beijing and other cities have had English translations replaced with Pinyin, a completely pointless and performatively nationalistic gesture that benefits no one. (If the Pinyin is intended to aid Chinese who don’t read characters, then by all means add it, but the English is for tourists, and a norm in most countries. I was in India recently where most signs have at least three if not four languages on them. Japan routinely has signs with English translations, as well as kanji and kana.)
All of this sabotages the genuine pleasure of travelling in China — the incredible high speed rail network, good public transport, ubiquitous and cheap taxis — to say nothing of the joys of just being in and experiencing the country itself.
More headaches arise when the traveller wants to communicate with those back home, be they bosses and colleagues or friends and loved ones. When I first lived in China in the early 2010s, and for much of that decade, this just required installing a VPN or two before you left, but increasingly, commercial VPNs available outside China are not effective in bypassing the GFW. (From contacts who have tested them and online discussions, there does not seem to be a single large VPN provider — Nord, Express, PIA, Proton etc — that is currently reliably functional in China.)
This is the culmination of something VPN providers were warning of way back in 2018 (as I reported at the time), that it was becoming too difficult and too expensive to play the cat and mouse game with Chinese censors any more. For most companies, it’s just not worth it: nearly all their China customers are expats, given the sensitivities of subscribing to an illegal service using a Chinese credit card, and there just aren’t enough of them to make it worth the costs of fighting anymore, something that has been compounded since the expat exodus that began during COVID.
There are private VPNs and Shadowsocks deployments that Chinese people can and do use (often of dubious security and definite illegality), and I’m sure many tech savvy expats have set up their own workarounds, but for your average tourist or business traveller, this is not possible, and the headache of trying, of clicking server after server in a VPN app and watching them all fail to connect, becomes a lasting memory of one’s trip.
Jesse Appell, the pioneering American comedian who helped invent the Chinese standup scene and now runs a tea company, gave a talk this week to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China, in which he discussed the value of people-to-people connections and unofficial diplomacy in improving ties between China and the rest of the world. Jesse came to China as a Fulbright scholar and lived in the country for a decade, performing both live and on Chinese state television. But I worry that this journey would just not be possible today.
One of the things Jesse talked about was how the algorithms on both sides of the GFW, driven by a need to maximise views and therefore ad revenue, are promoting antagonistic content (anti-China on YouTube, anti-Western on Chinese platforms) that is only serving to exacerbate the growing divide in the new Cold War. In the past, nationalistic rhetoric could be leavened through people-to-people connections — as Presidents Xi Jinping and Joe Biden recently showed — but such opportunities are becoming few and far between in today’s China, with foreign businesses and universities pulling out and shuttering official exchange programs, and Beijing’s policies making it harder and harder for foreigners to visit and live in the country.
My friend’s last day in China was spent at a beautiful tea field hotel near Hangzhou. After they raved about it, I asked if they’d ever consider moving to China, as the Hong Kong government has long encouraged young professionals to do. They made a face and started talking about their VPN headaches.