Astrill

PIA was pretty bad in my experience. Unless you can read Chinese, Astrill is far and away the best option, with PIA, Express, etc all being suitable backup options or something you might keep on just in case. But, generally it's pretty slow to connect, and slower to use.

PIA, Torguard, Astrill VPN and Express. Nord should work bit you need to change the protocol to their wireguard set up Nord Lynx or something like that. I know for a fact PIA works so why not get that subscription or Stroll VPN? Cheers lad

As someone who traveled to China a lot for work prior to the pandemic, it's worked fine for me. Prior to embarking on these work trips, people would tell me to get Express or Astrill.

I think what the top VPNs are doing now, is using their own DNS to unblock streaming sites. I had ExpressVPN before, they are very fast but I did get a lot of captchas with google and PayPal wouldn’t let me add a credit card to my account, when I got off ExpressVPN I was able to add it no problem, kinda weird some places are vpn sensitive. I currently have about 5 active VPN accounts been testing them, WeVPN, Astrill, NordVPN, TorGuard, and Windscribe. TorGuard is really good as well, just gotta get the streaming IP for the streaming sites but they don’t want you to do torrenting on them.

So what I used to do is have a self-hosted one for clean traffic and then use Astrill VPN for torrenting. It yielded much better results than other more advertised VPNs for China like ExpressVPN, but it varies on the city you are and the ISP. Either way, get it before you go there.

that was the lesson i learned from that summit. they kept the target on the back of express, while astrill got through. just a personal theory, but if astrill was working without issue while express was not, im led to believe that china was allowing it. if china was allowing it, my guess is astrill was playing ball with them somehow.

I found that it wasn't just a matter of your connection getting blocked; if you leave it up you'll experience some unreliable good periods (so, say, a torrent would download through the VPN overnight without a problem, but if I wanted to use the internet at any particular time, my connection was unlikely to be working). But yeah, I ended up signing up with Astrill.

Honestly, rather than looking for alternatives, I'd invest in a good VPN. We've tried a lot of different setups and services (individual VPN, smart routing in and out of our office...), but Astrill (https://www.astrill.com/) has been consistently good (save for a couple times when the internet was simply slow in all of China regardless).

I've been there for a while (2 years straight and more than 6 years since my first trip), I used many different VPNs providers and even setup my own servers.Although the company is a bit shady and I'm pretty sure they have some connection with the party, Astrill is the best to use in terms of performance, bandwidth and ease of use.

Astrill appears to be the most popular and best performing. A few high-end hotels that I've stayed at route all traffic through a VPN to cater to their Western audience.Many, many people with little technical ability use a VPN, especially in businesses dealing with the West.