New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Staying connected in China!?
hades_corps
Member
in Help
I'm travelling to China for work end of this month. Is it still advisable to get a HK SIM card or a private tailscale network is enough?
Also, any tip on food, shopping, etc,... in Shanghai?
This is my first trip to CN so any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks.
HK SIM?
- Is HK SIM needed?47 votes
- Yes, absolutely!78.72%
- Nah, Tailscale is enough.21.28%
Comments
Tailscale is unlikely to work. You might need v2ray, with vmess etc. With a HK or roaming sim nothing shuold be blocked. Using v2ray can still be good for wifi connection, etc
Tailscale doesn’t work. If it’s not a long trip, I’d just get an unlimited HK sim and be done with it. You can use VPNs if you know how to set it up correctly, but it’s not worth the hassle IMO.
any sim card outside CN works(as long as they support roaming in CN)
tailscale might work,but it will slow(CN qos UDP packet hard)
Using a local sim card is fine as you get a lot of data traffic, then configure a VPN client such as clash ,singbox, v2ray..... Both are fine and you can continue to use all your services as normal.
As for food or shopping, you can rest assured that you can find food from almost all over the world in Shanghai, even if you have different religious beliefs, so just be prepared to pay for it.
Shanghai has 24-hour takeout, online shopping basically within a week you can get the goods you buy, fast if 2 days, and what you need to do is to skillfully use these online shopping and takeout platform APP.
Eating: Meituan, ele.me, Taobao , Jingdong
Shopping: Taobao, Jingdong
Cab: didi, Gaode Map, Baidu Map
When you first arrive in Shanghai you will need to register your information with the police and if your job requires you to arrange your own housing, you will need to find a housing agent in your area who will take care of everything for you.
If anything bad happens to you you can call the hotline to complain as well as the police, don't get into trouble with people, 99% of the people are friendly, you can rest assured of that, and China's control over law and order is very strong, there are high definition cameras on the streets and alleys, so you don't have to worry about some security issues.
Thanks, as it's only a short trip, I'll do the roaming route.
It does not seem that Baidu Map have English, Didi have partial English so I'll go with this one.
In term of shopping, I won't stay for long so could you suggest places that I can look for recycle 'stuff' with extra VRAM?
a HK esim will make it much faster to access internet than tailscale, but I remember ChatGPT and Gemini banned Hong Kong IP.... you may consider getting one from RedTeaGo, they have some optimized HK plans with AI tools routing via SG.
Getting a local sim and use VPN app would be ideal, but I recall buying sim would require you to do the KYC.
Shanghai food and shopping?
It's all pits for outsiders and foreigners, and it's a poor experience!
You can try to go to Hangzhou and Suzhou!
When I was in China, I had no issues using my home internet as exit node.
just use you own data package in your phone number, it's the best option. if you don't have any data package, tailscale / vpn / proxy servers is the second option.
My working ways on last trip-Dec2024 to CN:Just setup multiple personal VPN outside of CN,and set a range of port forward to the vpn port of every VPN server,and change to next port on client app when it does not works. But before that you need to make sure your server IP is not on GFW block. And second some server is really not connectivity-wise (bad connection to CN network),and causing bad experience for VPN usage.
Last time i use Wireguard only,it does works every day,but it will ban the port sometimes,so change to another port will works again. (I mean using VPN mostly in hotel)
V2ray should be more secure for CN usage,but i lazy to setup and i more familiar with WG.
And last if you only using less than 20G in your journey,just buy 1-2 HK or other country roaming data sim card will works for the whole trips. Or use your own sim with roaming will be okay,but i would suggest to get a HK one for better connectivity.
Amap is a good choice and now has an English version too. Seems to now be branded gaode map.
When I'm out walking and exploring I tend to mostly use baidu (Chinese only) for accuracy in getting me somewhere the best route and Amap for countryside walking trails that are missing on baidu.
I can't remember if it works in Shanghai as I still had an MTR card for Shanghai from a previous trip, but if you're going to be using public transport, then the WeChat mini app 塔车码 (ta che ma) is very useful in many cities (although bus companies in some cities use a competitor app). Basically like having an MTR/bus card but as a mini app and sometimes it integrates with local bus time tables too.
china girls are hot.
It’s best to purchase a VPN, or you can set up a proxy on your own server. Shanghai has delicacies from all over China; I recommend hotpot, Sichuan cuisine, and Cantonese cuisine
You just need to install V2rayNG and connect to the vless-tcp-reality protocol proxy
just use your own sim or esim card from your country, you have no GFW issue, but it is expensive, only good for short trip.
if you need stay a long time, better use proxy service
I am actually a bit confused about this myself.
If a Hong Kong eSIM works, why do people still bother setting up VPNs or proxies?
maybe the data package is not enough for surfing internet
False.
Every girl I touched has cold skin.
in CN,our device do not support ESIM,u may buy some EUICC CARD to use esim via them.
and many HKEsim data package very expencive...andnd it is highly likely that a passport will be required for card application and real name registration, and various reasons combined result in a much higher threshold than buying a VPS and running scripts to obtain VPN
Because most Chinese don't have access to Hong Kong SIM cards, and Chinese phones don't support eSIM.
Do we need to report you to the authorities?
They do now. iPhone 17 Air is esim only, it's available in China. I believe Huawei also has an esim only phone. China Unicom and China Mobile both have esim plans now, might be beta testing phase still though.
HK sim or any provider's roaming SIM will work in China, though might be slow. All data needs to be routed to the provider's server and the route can be bad. Some HK SIMs might be routed to the US first then back to HK.
So, choose something with good routing. I've used microesim before (not in Shanghai, so the routing CAN be very different for you) and the IP terminates in Singapore with a latency of about 80ms or something. Decent experience overall. I've used the China Mobile option, which uses CMI and goes to SG. I don't remember the result during the "busy times" (between 5PM-11PM) as I'm almost always on wifi during those time and don't have a specific need for the esim data. If you do try the other options, I would appreciate that you can report the results here.
https://microesim.com/products/mainland-china-esim
IMO, the best is to get some travel sim alongside a proxy service like justmysocks, or set up your own ss/v2r servers. I don't see the need to set up your own, especially since you're just going for a short time.
Interesting, I thought Chinese phones didn't have eSIM because of government regulations.
Although given that so many international providers provide roaming with pretty weak KYC verification, maybe they're just giving up the pretence of being able to match every IP to a real person.
it's not that case, it's easy to match / target every domestic IP to a real person.
Remember that the whole link including sms/network is under control.
but if you are foreigner, bypassing gfw is not outlaw for you. don't worry about that.
It's not that bypassing gfw is illegal, it's what you do once you've bypassed the gfw. If you're just checking LET, no one will give a F.
yeah, every government is watching network activities nowadays including China. it’s a normal thing I can read about it through news report. if a person needs more privacy, there are more things needed to do, sadly it’s common in every country.
to say about china, of course if you went to China and wanna protect your business secrets, you need securious consultants. and of course you wanna say something they don’t like, it’s your responsibility to protect yourself. but if you just do anything , it’s ok cause you’re foreigner who would has the highest social rank in China, don’t worry
You can go locally to get a temporary SIM card with data. You can conveniently use Alipay and WeChat Pay for payments. You can also install the V2rayNG app on your phone, add a proxy node, and then use the Chinese SIM card data to access X, Facebook, and other sites normally. If needed, I can also help you with this.
try using amnezia, they have a custom wireguard protocol mod that bypasses the GFW.
also is good for putting idlers to use
https://docs.amnezia.org/documentation/instructions/install-vpn-on-server
good luck with communists.