04-08-2016 , 04:27 PM
There are 2 ways to bypass the Great Firewall of China:
Source
- HTTPs or SOCKS5 proxy
- VPN
HTTPs proxy must be installed on every browser and secures your browsing activity only.
This means that only data that passes through that browser is secured, the rest goes through regular channels.
SOCKS 5 proxy works not only with browser, but with some applications too. But not all providers that offer SOCKS5 proxies have them configured to work with all apps and even if they do, you have to manually configure it for each of those apps separately (such as messengers (Skype), torrenting clients (bittorent, utorrent, vuze etc), email clients etc).
Again, any info your PC sends to the internet that doesn't use the app where the proxy is installed will go through insecure channels.
VPN is a much better solution since it encrypts every bit of information that goes online AND VPN encryption methods (OpenVPN, L2TP, IPSec) are impossible to crack. The issue with VPNs and China is that encryption protocols either don't work at all (like OpenVPN), or are extremely unstable. However, there are several VPN providers that created custom VPN protocols that cannot be detected by the chinese firewall because they are masked to appear as regular https traffic. Please refer to the Best VPN for China guide where you can review the providers that actually deliver a stable service to Chinese citizens. Please note, however, that some of those providers' websites are blocked on an IP level so you may want to use a free browser extension to access them and subscribe for a service.
Source
