China has been trying for a decade with zero success, best of luck
I spent years living in China. Do you really mean zero success?
OpenVPN stopped working in 2017. Deep packet inspection prevents the initial handshake. I hosted my own SS for a number of years before switching to wireguard, with more success… however, they IP ban a majority of VPS IP ranges, so the providers Linode/DigitalOcean were messed up.
And everyone experiences VPN slow down during CPC conferences.
It can only be worse now.
I mean zero practical success in banning vpns or stopping vpns from functioning correctly, yes.
They scared non-technically-minded people who already didn’t use vpns into not trying them, but everyone I know in China who used and uses vpns without a problem for years are still using them today.
I know nothing about running a server, I’m just talking about my experience from the user side of the equation.
Ah ok. Well, as I said I lived there for years and i’m telling you they can and do block VPN traffic (not all, another commenter mentioned Astrill) quite well. To say zero success is incorrect.
Location (and peering) might be a factor, so if you/your friends lived somewhere different to I your experience may differ.
