Last updated: August 2026 — rewritten after LetsVPN ended its mainland China service, with fresh eSIM results from our own summer testing.
If you’re a digital nomad, your laptop is your lifeline. The thought of being cut off from Slack, Zoom, Google, or your favorite AI tools is enough to make anyone skip a destination.
The “Great Firewall” (GFW) is more sophisticated than ever, and 2026 proved it. The tool that half the nomad internet recommended for China is now gone, and the eSIM most guides still push disappointed us in the field this summer. Here’s what actually works instead — including the services our own team uses on the ground.
First, the big news: LetsVPN is no longer an option
If you’ve read an older China guide, you almost certainly saw LetsVPN recommended as the default choice. That advice is now dead, and it’s worth understanding why so you can judge other guides you read.
After roughly three weeks of failed attempts to restore connections, LetsVPN announced on April 28, 2026 that it was winding down mainland China operations. The company resumed normal service worldwide on May 9 but stated it still could not guarantee availability in mainland China. On May 15, their CEO published a public apology letter confirming it plainly: LetsVPN can no longer provide VPN service to mainland China, and they advised Chinese users to request refunds. They are retiring their old “always connects” slogan.
The lesson isn’t that LetsVPN was bad. It’s that no single VPN is permanently safe in China. Any guide that tells you to install one app and stop thinking is setting you up to be stranded. Redundancy is the entire strategy.
1. The Mobile Solution: Roaming eSIMs (still the easiest win)
The single biggest breakthrough for nomads is the roaming eSIM. Unlike a local Chinese SIM card, a roaming eSIM routes your data through a gateway in another country — Nomad’s exits through Singapore, for example. Your phone connects to Chinese towers, but your traffic leaves the country before the filtering happens.
The result? You bypass the Great Firewall automatically. No VPN required for your phone.
We ran these ourselves in China this summer. Our rankings below reflect what we actually experienced, which does not match what most English-language guides currently recommend.
- Best value: Trip.com eSIM
- Why: This is the one we recommend first. Trip.com is a Chinese-owned global travel giant, so their eSIMs are tuned for local towers while still delivering unfiltered access — and it simply worked for us, consistently. The pricing isn’t close to anyone else either: a 30GB/30-day plan runs about $15.75, roughly $0.53/GB, which is several times cheaper per gigabyte than the big eSIM brands. Short trips start under $1/day. Look for plans explicitly labeled “ChatGPT Available” — that’s Trip.com’s shorthand for firewall bypass.
- Best backup: Nomad eSIM
- Why: Nomad performed noticeably better for us than the provider most guides name first, and the price is genuinely reasonable. It runs on China Unicom and China Telecom with 4G/5G, and exits through Singapore. Recent pricing: $9 for 3GB/30 days, $17 for 10GB/30 days, $25 for 20GB/30 days, or $35 for 50GB/45 days. There are unlimited options too, from $12 for 3 days up to $33 for 10 days. Hotspot and tethering are supported, which matters — this is what rescues your laptop when the WiFi VPN fails.
- Bonus: new users can claim a free 1GB trial eSIM. Use it to verify installation works on your specific phone before you fly.
- A note on Holafly: most China guides still list Holafly as the top pick, and we did too until recently. We tested it in China during summer 2026 and performance was poor enough that we’ve stopped recommending it. Others report good results, so your mileage may vary — but we’re not going to recommend something we couldn’t get to work well ourselves. If you already have one, bring a second option.
- Pro Tip: Always purchase and install your eSIM before you enter China. Buying one after you arrive is a technical headache, because the purchase page itself may be unreachable.
- Pro Tip 2: eSIMs are cheap enough that buying two from different providers is a rounding error on a trip budget — and it’s the single most reliable insurance policy against connectivity failure in China.
2. The Laptop Solution: Western VPNs with obfuscation
Your phone is covered by an eSIM, but your laptop will rely on the WiFi at our retreat or at local cafes. For that you need a VPN with “obfuscation” — the ability to disguise VPN traffic as ordinary web traffic so deep packet inspection doesn’t flag it.
- Astrill VPN: the business standard
- With LetsVPN gone, Astrill is the most consistently recommended paid option for China in 2026 testing. Its proprietary StealthVPN protocol was built specifically to defeat GFW deep packet inspection. It is the most expensive mainstream option by a wide margin, but for professional remote workers it’s a defensible business expense.
- ExpressVPN and Surfshark: reasonable backups
- Independent 2026 testing puts these in the “usually works” tier rather than the “always works” tier. They’re fine as a second layer, but we wouldn’t fly in with only one of these installed.
- What to skip: free VPNs, and — as of mid-2026 — Mullvad, Private Internet Access, and Proton VPN are widely reported as unreliable to unusable from the mainland. NordVPN sits somewhere in between.
3. The insider option: what people in China actually use
Here’s the part most English-language guides never tell you. The tools that Chinese residents rely on day to day are not Western VPN brands at all. They’re subscription node services — known locally as 机场 (“airports”) — that sell access to Shadowsocks and V2Ray servers you load into a third-party client like Clash, Shadowrocket, or sing-box.
The good ones sell IPLC or IEPL dedicated lines. This matters enormously: an IPLC line is a leased private circuit that crosses the border on internal infrastructure, so your traffic never traverses the public international gateway where the GFW does its inspection. That’s why these services stay up during sensitive periods when consumer VPNs fall over.
These two are ones we’ve used personally:
- SSRDOG
- Operating since 2022, using IPLC and IEPL dedicated lines. Independent trackers put its recent uptime in the mid-90s percent. Entry plans start around ¥25/month. Handles Netflix, YouTube, and ChatGPT without extra configuration.
- FlyingBird (飞鸟)
- Also founded in 2022, run by an overseas team, with 120+ nodes across 30+ countries. Priced by data rather than time: ¥15/month for 100GB up to ¥150/month for 1TB, with no device limit and no speed cap. There’s a free trial, and top-up data packs if you run out mid-month.
Be realistic about the tradeoffs before you go this route:
- Chinese only. Signup, dashboards, and support are in Mandarin. Support runs through Telegram, not email tickets.
- Payment friction. These are built for domestic customers, so checkout typically expects Alipay or WeChat Pay.
- You bring your own client. The service sells you a subscription link; you supply the app that consumes it.
- Provider risk is real. The 机场 market has a well-known problem of operators abruptly shutting down and keeping prepaid balances. Both services above have multi-year track records, but this is exactly why you never pay for a long term up front and never make one of these your only option.
4. A newer companion app worth knowing about
One genuine annoyance in China is that a normal VPN is an all-or-nothing switch. Flip it on and Instagram works but DiDi, Alipay, Amap, and food delivery slow to a crawl or break outright, because those apps now think you’re overseas. Flip it off and you lose everything you came for.
Traveler’s VPN is a new indie app built specifically around that problem. It splits your traffic: local Chinese apps route locally and stay fast, while your home apps tunnel out. It also lets you connect a server you already own for a one-time $2.99 unlock, supporting Outline, Shadowsocks, WireGuard, and Trojan.
That last part is where we think it’s most interesting. If you subscribe to SSRDOG or FlyingBird above, this gives you a clean English-language client with smart local routing on top of a proven Chinese line — a much nicer experience than wrestling with a raw Clash config.
Our honest caveats: the developer contacted us, and we have not personally tested this in China. It’s iPhone, iPad, and Mac only — no Windows or Android. It doesn’t yet appear in any independent China VPN testing. And its own managed servers use standard protocols that the Great Firewall targets hardest, so we’d treat those as unproven for China specifically, even though the split-routing idea is sound. Use the free trial to test it before you fly, and don’t make it your only plan. If you do try it in China, tell us how it went and we’ll update this page.
The “Three-Layer Defense” Strategy
This is what we recommend our retreat guests set up. The whole point is that no single layer failing can strand you:
- Primary: a roaming eSIM on your phone — Trip.com is our first pick — with hotspotting enabled so it can rescue your laptop in an emergency.
- Secondary: a premium obfuscating VPN such as Astrill on your laptop and phone.
- Fallback: a structurally different third option — a second eSIM from another provider, an IPLC line from a Chinese provider, or a self-hosted WireGuard or Outline server on a VPS you control. The word that matters is different: when the GFW tightens, it tends to knock out one whole category of technology at once, so your backup should not be a second consumer VPN.
Install and test everything before you board. Nearly every VPN website and app store listing is blocked from inside China, so if you arrive with nothing installed, you may have no way to download the fix.
Common Connectivity Myths
“Is LetsVPN coming back?” Their CEO has publicly said they cannot continue serving mainland China. Treat it as gone, and be skeptical of any 2026 guide still listing it as a top pick — that’s a reliable sign the page hasn’t been genuinely updated.
“Isn’t Holafly the standard recommendation?” It’s the most marketed recommendation, which is not the same thing. Affiliate commissions shape a lot of eSIM rankings. We tested it and moved it down the list. Trust field reports over listicles.
“Is Starlink an option?” No. Starlink is not authorized for use in mainland China and the satellites are geofenced to prevent unauthorized access.
“Can I use NordVPN or ExpressVPN?” Sometimes. They’re global leaders and they’re frequently targeted by the GFW as a result. They might work on any given day, but they shouldn’t be your only option.
“Will I get in trouble for using a VPN?” China regulates VPN provision rather than tourist usage, and enforcement action against individual foreign travelers browsing normally is not something we’ve seen. Millions of residents and visitors use these tools daily. That said, this is a genuinely gray area, so use good judgment.
Why Our Retreat Handles VPN and eSIMs
Navigating the digital landscape in China for the first time is daunting — and as the LetsVPN shutdown showed, the ground shifts underneath you without warning. That’s exactly the kind of thing we’d rather you didn’t have to research from scratch.
At China Digital Nomads, we provide every attendee with a complimentary and reliable VPN that we actively test and swap out as conditions change. The cost of an eSIM is out of pocket, since the right choice varies by phone model.
Interested in joining us for the next coliving and coworking retreat in China? Book a call with us to see if it’s the right fit for you.
