We’ll be arriving into Beijing next weekend. Would like to set up a reliable VPN or eSIM to be able to access Australian university online content whilst we’re away. Can anyone make any recommendations based on recent experience?
I’ve decided to go with Nomad and my daughters with Airalo (to have all our bases covered). We’ll report back here with any positive/negative results! Fingers crossed 
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I found Airalo to be great. The problem was for me that you need a Chinese phone number to register for Didi. My partner is Chinese so she just registered for one. Also, I felt a bit sick one day and stayed in my hotel using my esim. Suddenly it stopped working. I spent ages trying to work it out and eventually I hot spotted off my partners ESIM and discovered it had ran out of data. It is so ridiculous that it doesn’t let you check your data and top up once it runs out.
If I couldn’t hotspot off her I would have had to buy another SIM card and by that stage I didn’t have a VPN installed, which means I could have been stuck in the Chinese internet cage.
You could get a Hong Kong sim card with a mainland Chinese phone number.
Just contacted Holafly and you can’t hotspot laptops. Does anyone know of any other eSIM which has this option?
There’s an eSIM that comes with VPN on Alipay Trip.com. Works great most of the time and comes very cheap compared to other esims
am there atm and the combo of astrill/letsvpn has yet to fail me (the latter especially impressive, since it’s so much cheaper)
Does your University provide VPN?
Mine does and it works without any issues. Can’t say same about VPNs that are often mentioned here.
eSIM is the way to go if you don’t need to have Chinese phone number. With Nomad I was able to hotspot to my computer.
Airalo support just messaged me with this response…
You can use hotspot/tethering with Airalo eSIMs at no extra charge.
You don’t need a VPN if you use an e-SIM (assuming you’re concerned about the great firewall). I bought mine from eSIMDB as Airalo can be a bit pricey
Nomad works perfectly and it’s cheaper than Airalo
you can give it a try to Datajet eSIM it has one of the best telco infrastructure built, and for china they have great rates and you can just top-up the same sim as much as you want
I was there Feb 24. I bought Astrill & didn’t need it.
I kept it switched off & used my UK mobile data normally.
I was able to access everything as usual.
When I bought a Chinese SIM, I found that it would not access the sites without VPN however, the VPN would only connect if I was connected by WiFi making it useless as an aid for navigation which is what I bought it for.
I understand that your circumstances may be different but this is my very recent experience in Beijing.
Wishing you all the best on your trip to China.
Which one was better
Alipay has a DiDi icon. You can order one through that (as a foreign user).
Trust me it works.
So Airalo eSIM works like a VPN with no restrictions?
I love Airalo. Glad to hear it works just fine in China.
Can i buy a Hong Kong sim from Beijing?
Do you know if there’s laptop connectivity?