China is probably the most famous Internet censored area of the world, along with Iran, Vietnam, and other parts of The Middle East, and Asia. Though Internet censorship keeps much of the country in the dark as far as social networking and world news goes, there are still many users who escape censorship policies by using virtual private networks. One of the more reliable tools in bypassing firewall restrictions at home, at work, and on the go, a VPN in China is essential for getting access to blocked sites from behind The GFW (Great Firewall).
But China knows this, and although the ‘official’ statement made by China is that VPNs are not illegal and its perfectly ok to use them for ‘legitimate’ purposes, no one is clear what that would entail, and as most other laws in China, it depends on where you are and who you are, just how stringently these laws are enforced. So although you won’t have black-ops forces crashing down your door in the middle of the night because you connected to your Facebook account from a VPN (not that they could check this), there are many VPN services in China that are blocked.
StrongVPN, 12VPN, and SwitchVPN have all had their main domains blocked in China. Why? Its unclear whether China is blocking sites based on who uses them (Chinese people vs foreigners), how much traffic they get, or some other criteria. It’s also possible that they’d like to block all of them, but some still manage to provide access to users in China. Its also a possibility that they just want to block a few to ‘bottleneck’ VPN users and monitor a few sites, rather than many. Whatever the reason for blocking VPN sites, it seems easy enough for these services to create secondary or alternate domains for users to get access.
For example, some services that have had their main domains blocked (.com), have simply switched to (.net), and use a redirect for Chinese IP addresses. Others will add words to their new domain names, or a completely different name altogether. While you won’t find these in Google search engines, you will find them in advertisements, blogs, banners, and other places.
And yet, many other services remain untouched. And if China can so effectively block the main domains, why can’t they block alternate domains too? It’s still very unclear what exactly make a VPN in China qualify as blockable or not, but it is clear that there still are quite a few options out there, and China doesn’t have complete control over this situation quite yet.