Ok I’ve never been to China since September 2019 - at that time both Express and Nord were working ok, I mean, they don’t get your phone connected to their vpn servers all the time but at least good enough for me.
Ok here are the ones I downloaded:
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ExpressVPN - works very occasionally
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NordVPN - not working anymore
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VyprVPN - no
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Proton VPN - the worst one I’ve ever tried
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TorGuard - no
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Surfshark - it’s owned by the company which owns Nord, so I guess when Nord doesn’t work there’s no reason to expect this one can function
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Astrill - fairly good, sometimes slow
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Windscribe - quite to my surprise this one sometimes has better connection than Astrill
Download Shadowrocket for iOS and MacOS, Clash or v2rayNG for Android and Windows, then look for subscription sites (called airports), add subscriptions in the software and update subscriptions.
Astrill is indeed very suspiciously the only one that works consistently in China.
It’s either they have this magical unknown technology or “someone” allows them to operate for obvious reasons. I might be wrong but I can’t think of another possibility.
If you do choose to use them, I’d install their aplet on the router, and then use a different VPN on the client side to tunnel through it.
Nordvpn is the shittiest app ever if you’re in Shanghai. Basically a scam
i would never use a vpn in china cause that’s illegal. also the first rule of vpn club is you do not talk about vpn club.