The Chinese government is well-known for its restrictive policy toward both traditional and modern media as a method of avoiding potential authority subversions. Some of the popular examples include firewalls, monitoring systems, shuttered websites, and even jail time for bloggers, activists, and journalists. Even Google silently gave up on its battle against the Chinese authorities.
Freedom of speech and press are guaranteed under China’s Constitution, but the definition of state secrets still remains quite vague, allowing the authorities to censor any information deemed harmful to their economic and political interests. That’s why the Chinese turned to VPNs as a means of combating state pressure. Read our latest report to discover whether Mullvad VPN can provide you with Internet freedom in China.
Port Selection/Forwarding
Countries like China and Iran are notorious for blocking VPN providers (we can argue about the overall effectiveness of such measures, though). Mullvad sticks out as an effective countermeasure since it allows its users to run the VPN service on any port.
You can run OpenVPN over TCP port 443, for example. HTTPS (the encrypted protocol for website security) uses this port to enable online commerce in its entirety. So, it is highly unlikely that this port will be blocked at any given time.
All traffic on TCP port 443 is conveniently routed inside the TLS encryption, which is also used by HTTPS. This makes your VPN traffic much harder to discover using DPI, which is why TCP port 443 is one of the best tools for evading VPN blocks.
SSL/SSH Tunneling
If you’re unable to evade censorship or hide your VPN by switching to TCP port 443, Mullvad also provides you with SSL and SSH tunneling. This will hide your data inside an additional layer of encryption. DPI methods won’t be able to penetrate this “outer” encryption and discover the OpenVPN encryption inside.
Shadowsocks
You can use this open-source proxy app with Mullvad and circumvent Internet censorship. This tool was created by a Chinese developer to combat the Great Firewall.
Note that you can also multi-hop your VPN connections by accessing one of Mullvad’s bridging servers. This will complicate any attempt of a traffic analysis attack.
SOCKS5 Proxy
These servers will be of great use for all your torrenting endeavors in China. You can either protect only your BitTorrent client or use it together with your VPN for double torrenting protection.