As a Chinese user who regularly breaches the GFW, QUIC is a god send. Tunneling traffic over a QUIC instead of TLS to breach the GFW has much lower latency and higher throughput (if you change the congestion control). In addition, for those foreign websites not blocked by GFW, the latency difference between QUIC and TCP based protocol is also visible to the naked eye, as the RTT from China to the rest of the world is often high.
You won't casually breach the GFW. I would treat any advice posted publicly on the internet about how to breach the GFW as probably-malicious. They are better at networking than you are.
Beware when using VPN to breach the GFW. Recently a Chinese netizen had to pay over 1 million yuan (>145K USD) for using VPN [1][2]. Before this incident, only VPN service sellers were prosecuted [3]. Beware when doing this casually.
Foreigners need to worry about the new Chinese anti-espionage law instead [1]: at least 17 Japanese nationals have been recently accused of spying in China [2], and a US citizen jailed for life [3]. The German car industry is worried [4].
The law broadens the scope beyond what it originally sought to prohibit – leaks of state secrets and intelligence – to include any “documents, data, materials, or items related to national security and interests.” [1]
I’d say when I travel I rely on Google maps. Without it, yes it is still possible to find your ways but it is so much easier using those maps on the phone especially in non-English areas.
Why would you want to use Google Maps in China? All the crowdsourced information wouldn't be available and the government is hostile to it. Wouldn't it be better to use whatever the Chinese competitor is?
Unless your goal is to read about Tiananmen Square in Tiananmen Square. Which just doesn't sound smart.
Obviously, it's different if you live there. But on a two-week vacation it doesn't seem worth it.
Without Google services your phone is a brick? You can use Apple services, Microsoft services, any number of other websites. People really like to dramatize the GFW.
On an android phone, 5 years ago, it turned into a brick when i stepped out of shenzhen airport. There is a surprising amount of chatty network stuff going on under the hood that stops working. I ended up using a vpn which fixed it. Even basic stuff like contacts no longer worked .
Plus without gmail, you can't recover a password or in some cases authorise yourself on 3rd party services.
> I would treat any advice posted publicly on the internet about how to breach the GFW as probably-malicious. They are better at networking than you are.
The default congestion control is CUBIC, which is very slow for connections between China and the rest of the world. Google's BBR is a great improvement, and sometimes I use "brutal" congestion control, which is basically a constant speed.
