Informed Chinese Students of VPN. Is it safe for me to go to China?
I live in the UK. I teach English online (group lessons). In my lessons, many of my students inform the Chinese students about VPNs. I don’t stop the conversation and sometimes help to explain what it is.
Is it safe for me to visit China or will I get arrested?
This is a reflection of the hysteria wider media has generated about China that people would be concerned about such things.
Ask all those local English teachers in China from the uk then. They all seem to be just fine in pubs at Shenzhen. And they pretty much all tweet and/or post on Ins on a daily basis.
Because you haven’t gotten a serious, direct answer yet (though it should be obvious to sus one out, but whatever.)
You’re fine. The VPN thing, it’s casually talked about all over China, really not a big deal. Sometimes wechat groups can in theory be shut down for helping people use VPNs, this seems to be more of a fear than much of a reality, but I imagine they actually would shut down a “how to use VPNs - VPN, Tor, and proxy discussion” group, but people don’t get in trouble or added to a list or anything for talking about VPNs. If they did it would be the longest list in China.
People are even pretty open about using VPNs in China. There was a guy arrested apparently for using one a while ago but he was using it to download porn and sell it. You could count the cases of it happening on probably one hand.
The one thing that actually can get you in trouble in China, being in China and selling a VPN to other people. Probably also running a VPN that you then give to other people. The odds of getting caught would still be low, but it has happened before.
More dangerous to visit UK than to visit China.
Lived there for 10 years and helped more than a few of my local friends setup vpns.
Even talked a ton of politics while I was there. Government never did anything to me. There is a lot of propaganda in the west.
Ok, traditional Western VPN’s don’t work in china. Most of the time. They made their own VPNs to bypass the GFW, Such as ZodAcc and Aura Cloud, these use specific protocols not found in western VPNs. So, 1 You won’t be arrested, and. the information you gave them was useless, Western VPNs are more expensive, don’t work in China. So there was no point.
You have about 0.01 % chance that your WeChat becomes abroad only and people with chinese phone number won’t see your posts anymore. Thats about it. You can still send direct messages to anyone.
Calm down. Just don’t say anything bad about Xi and you’re good.