Recently came back from there for a week. Thought that place was pretty chill, surprisingly so when compared to the rest of China.
I am just wondering if anyone tried DNing there and what you thought about the place?
Note: no political reasons whatsoever please, I hate politics with a passion. I want pure life/work related response please. Thank you.
Hangzhou can be pretty if you’re around the lake but it’s kind of dusty and smoggy away from it.
Working in a hostel on a VPN is fine, you can run to starbucks if the internet isn’t good enough but you will have the occasional bad day where you just can’t work. I also recommend the ATour chain of hotels, they’re a mid-range business chain and have excellent internet, office chairs with a sort of desk or table and in-house complimentary laundry. They’re not dirt cheap but are easily affordable if you’re earning a western salary.
Chinese internet can be hit and miss and VPNs get attacked constantly and blocked occasionally, they’re not 100% reliable which is a problem for working. You need to keep trying different ISPs and different VPNs and sometimes you just won’t succeed. This is especially true during party conferences or if federal officials are visiting your city or any other high profile event that could draw a crowd. Reality TV shows filming locally have gotten the same treatment sometimes.
You also can’t ignore Chinese politics because it doesn’t ignore you. Other than the above issues with internet, you might find yourself having trouble because a journalist in your home country published an article about CCP corruption or someone said something about the South China Sea or Taiwan. If you got into trouble for a minor offence at such times, it could be blown way out of proportion to punish your home government. Visas might suddenly not be renewed, it happens.
You only have rights in China until you don’t, then you’re fucked. This happens to a small number of people every year but for them, it’s life destroying.
There are long tourist visas for some countries (USA and Canada only maybe) but everyone else is stuck at 3 months and it’s a pain to get. Even the North Americans only have a 90 day stay. There’s no legal way to get longer visas for others and the illegal ones have mostly been cracked down over the last few years.
I am WELL AWARE of the politics having lived in Beijing for 2+ years. I simply do not participate in it. There is a difference.
I simply want to focus on Hangzhou as a place, that is it.
You can’t just “opt out” of Chinese politics lol it touches on every area of life even when it comes to something as simple as reliable internet access which is obviously pretty important for people in this sub.
I didn’t “opt out”
Your stance comes across as pretty political though
« OP, come to jail now » « Sorry officer, I don’t participate in politics »
…. Politics is the #1 cons of china, were not talking about petty stuff - now its policies that directly affects your day to day. Kinda hard to put aside.
If you don’t mind these policies sure china is fine. But there is a difference between accepting them and « not participating »
Wow great response. Thanks. And plus, I heard that the authorities or government do know when you use VPN. Obviously they probably can’t eavesdrop on the actual data going across, but that their technology does allow knowing if somebody is using VPN.
Usually if they can reliably tell its a VPN, they’ll perform deep packet inspection which massively increases latency, or they’ll throttle your internet connection entirely and you’ll be at some tiny bandwidth until half an hour after you turn the VPN off.
Most VPNs attempt to disguise themselves as random 443 traffic these days and use custom or encrypted hand-shaking to prevent that being recognised.
Stuff like OpenVPN doesn’t have a hope in China because it can be identified and then attacked/throttled.