Circumventing Internet Censorship in China
It’s been a while since I went back to China in June this year. This post is intended as a summary of my most recent Internet experience using some very useful bypassing techniques.
AT&T Passport Data
AT&T Passport is the international data roaming plan by AT&T. With this plan enabled, you are able to select available network carriers (such as China Unicom) while in China, but need no further censorship circumvention, as if you were using a non-China network carrier directly. I’m not clear if other mobile network providers behave similarly. However, this method has its limitations of data usage, so you cannot use it freely.
ocserv
OpenConnect VPN server (ocserv) works best of all means. It is fast and stable.
To ease the server-side setup, I used ocserv-docker on a DigitalOcean box and a Linode box. By the time I was setting it up, there was some dependency errors, so I forked it into my own GitHub repo, fixed the errors, and built a Docker image. I ran the following commands on an Ubuntu 14.04 system that uses UFW:
# Add UFW rules
sudo ufw allow 443/tcp
sudo ufw allow 443/udp
sudo service iptables-persistent save
sudo ufw reload
# Install Docker image
mkdir -p ~/ocserv-docker/ocserv
touch ~/ocserv-docker/ocserv/ocpasswd
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shichao-an/ocserv-docker/master/ocserv/ocserv.conf -O ~/ocserv-docker/ocserv/ocserv.conf
sudo docker run --name ocserv -d --privileged -v ~/ocserv-docker/ocserv:/etc/ocserv -p 443:443/tcp shichaoan/ocserv-docker
# Add user and prompt for password
sudo docker exec -it ocserv ocpasswd shichao
# Debug
sudo docker logs ocserv
sudo docker exec -ti ocserv /bin/bash
Then, you can install Cisco AnyConnect clients on both your computer and mobile devices and try to connect your server.
Shadowsocks
Shadowsocks also works well. It’s just that I didn’t bother to set it up my mobile devices, that is, iPhone and iPad. I set up the server side with my Docker image, whose source is shichao-an/docker-shadowsocks-libev.
ExpressVPN
ExpressVPN, one of the best commercial VPNs, is slow and unstable most of the time, which is basically unusable in China.
Pulse Secure
My company provides Pulse Secure SSL VPN. It is usable, but very slow.