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I was in China for a week at the Amazon office. It was very jarring not able to load google. Or YouTube. Or gmail. Or google maps. The list goes on and on. Facebook won’t load. Even many vpns are blocked.

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There are apparently 100 million VPN users in China. So people do access outside offerings. Everyone I met in China had used Instagram or Facebook. These things can’t be stopped.

Yes they can and they are. It's hard to find at least a partially working VPN and using VPN is highly illegal.

You can use data roaming though on your foreign SIM card to access the real internet.

Huh? Never had a problem with VPN there. Used OpenVPN to my own VPS mostly, and the cheapest PIA offer in February this year.

How does Amazon actually operate their China office? Don't they have a site-to-site VPN back to the main corporate network for secure internal communications?

This was about two years ago and I don’t want to talk about internals too much. But from the office I couldn’t load any google sites. I was able to manually connect to the amazon vpn and reach google.

There's an unrestricted internet link to Hong Kong that you can rent. My company's office was paying 35000 USD but it's a big office, around 300 people.

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