@Suty I saw that you asked in another post about VPN usage among Chinese users, but it seems you didn’t really get a professional or technically accurate answer, so I’d like to answer it here.
Let me answer your question about how people in China use VPNs.
In reality, the number of people in China who use tools to bypass internet restrictions is not small at all. It is especially common among younger users, programmers, students studying abroad, people working internationally, and those who frequently use overseas internet services. So I was actually quite surprised that many Chinese Windy users seem not to use, or even know much about, these tools.
That said, the mainstream approach in China today no longer relies mainly on traditional commercial VPNs. Instead, many users rely on proxy-based protocols and subscription-based proxy services.
Common protocols include Shadowsocks, VLESS, VMess, and Trojan, usually used with clients such as Clash, sing-box, Shadowrocket, and v2rayN.
Users typically buy a proxy subscription and import a subscription URL into the client. This gives them access to multiple overseas nodes, for example in Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, or the United States, and the client can automatically select or switch routes based on rules.
One major reason these solutions have become more popular than traditional VPNs is flexibility.
Traditional OpenVPN, IPsec, and some other VPN protocols often have relatively recognizable and fixed traffic characteristics. Modern proxy solutions can use different transports such as TLS, WebSocket, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, or QUIC, combined with encryption, traffic obfuscation, and protocol camouflage. This can make the traffic look more like ordinary HTTPS or other normal internet traffic, reducing the chance of simple protocol-based detection, blocking, or interference.
Another major advantage is rule-based proxying. Traffic to Chinese domestic websites can go directly without passing through an overseas server, while only traffic to overseas websites, restricted services, or destinations specified by the user goes through the proxy.
Compared with a traditional full-tunnel VPN, this has several benefits: lower latency for domestic websites, better performance, less unnecessary proxy traffic, and less exposure from routing all network traffic through a single third-party VPN server.
Multi-node support and automatic failover are also important. A single subscription may include many servers, and the client can choose nodes based on latency, availability, or routing rules. If one node stops working, users can quickly switch to another instead of depending on one VPN server.
So technically, what many Chinese users use today is not simply “turn on a VPN and route everything through it.” It is closer to:
proxy client + subscription service + multiple nodes + multiple proxy protocols + rule-based routing + TLS/traffic obfuscation.
People still casually call all of this “VPN” because it is easier to understand, but when talking to programmers, it is more accurate to say that these systems are architecturally different from traditional VPN technologies such as OpenVPN, IPsec, or WireGuard.
