Buying stuff on Taobao

First you do a search for the item you want to buy. In my case a Logitech mouse called m505.

You will get a result page similar to that above. There are a few things you should know in order to select the best offer / vendor:

• Location: in this example Shanghai (上海) or Beijing (北京). This is not very important but influences the delivery time and sometimes also the courier fee.
• Below the price you will get the fee (运费) for standard delivery, often you can choose other (usually more expensive) options during checkout.
• If you are afraid of buying things online, you should look for 货到付款. If the seller offers this option, you pay at your door when the product is delivered and not in advance.
• The term 信用卡 means credit card and is displayed next to a small credit card icon. For those of you who do not have a Chinese bank account with online payment features, this might be the best way to go.
• 七天退换 means you can send the article back within 7 days to get your money back. Be careful with this however, this does not always works as smooth as it sounds.
• 最近成交88笔 means during the last few days the seller sold 88 pieces of this item. If this number is high it usually indicates that the seller real, the price is good and as he is selling a lot – there is a good chance that he has the item on stock.

Before you pay

It is important to know, that although each items is listed with number in stock, that a lot of sellers do no actually have it on stock but need to order or reorder it themselves. Yes, this is against the rules but it is nevertheless very common and it seems everybody excepts this practice. Therefore, what you want to do before checking out is contacting the seller. Although there is an e-mail address listed, this is rarely used in China. The way to go is to use Taobao’s integrated chat-function to ask if the item is on stock.

Payment

The payment can be done via all kinds of chinese online banks and depending on the seller also credit cards. The payment system that inteacts with the differnt banks is Alipay. You can also use this directly. It is easy to create an account on Alipay.com. If you pay via credit card and get your money back from the seller, he can not put it back on your credit card and the money goes to your alipay account by default.

Satellite TV

As TV Satellites are in a geostationary orbit, it is not possible to receive signals from American or European Satellites. Normal Chinese TV will only give you the english language CCTV9 “propaganda”-channel. Luckily other Asian countries are in a better position and have a lot of foreign language channels. The best thing: those satellites can be received in China.

• Dream Satellite TV Package from the Philippines
  Channels: HBO Asia, CNN, ESPN, CNBC Asia, BBC World, Ben sports, Australia Network, Bloomberg, NGC, Animal planet, Cinemax, Star Movies, Star Chinese Movies, Hallmark, Star World, AXN, NGC, ETC, 2nd Avenue, MTV, EntertainmentCentral, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Animax, Star Sports, DW, TBN, JCTV, Living Asia
• HBOCN Family Package from China
  Channels: HBO, CNN, ESPN, Discovery, Cinemax, AXN, TV5, NHK, TVB Jade, BBC world, MTV, Channel Newsasia, Phoenix Movie, Star sports, TVB xinghe, Hallmark Channel, Star Movies, Bloomberg, CNBC, CCTV4, CCTV9, CCTV-Olympics, NOW,EuroSportNews, Phoenix News, Shenzhen TV Station, Celestial Movies, Macau TV, KBS World, Fashion TV, MTV China, Guangdong TV Station, Phoenix Chinese
• Sinosat 1
  This satellite owned by the Chinese government broadcasts most of the TV channels available in international hotels but is not available for individual subscription. Before 2003 hacked cards were available to watch the system illegally. After a system/encryption change it seem not to be possible anymore.
• DSTV Package from South Africa
  Channels: Supersport1,Supersport2, Supersport3, Supersport5, Supersport6, Supersport7, Supersport8, Supersport update , DD Sports, Star Movies, Hallmark, FilmAsia, ESPN, StarSports, CNN, Skynews, CNBC Asia, BBC World, Discovery, NGC, History, AnimalPlanet, FashionTV, AXN, TV5, NHK, MTV, Channel[v], CartoonNetwork

Check out hbocn.cn if you are interested in the options above.

Internet TV

There are quite a few TV channels who do life broadcasts over the internet. The quality varies but is most often impacted by the very low speed of the Chinese Internet to foreign Servers. Beeline TV has a good list of foreign language online TV stations. Some TV stations stream through the internet but will prevent you from watching the stream in china due to licensing issues. You can circumvent this bey connecting through a VPN provider in that country.

Recorded TV

Some countries offer services like an Online TV Recorder which you can program over the internet and download the videos later. These services are especially popular in Germany where even a free online tv recorder is available (cluttered with ads though): OnlineTVRecorder.com

Proxy Servers

Using a proxy server you can pipe your web-traffic through another computer before establishing the connection with your target server/website. As most proxy servers are not on a black list in China many blocked sites will become accessible. The “Great Firewall” has become better though. In some cases it will do live-content filtering and reset connections. This can’t be be prevented by using a proxy server as the content will still go unencrypted through the Chinese internet. The good point is: there are many free proxy servers you can use (although they are usually slow) and they are very easy to setup.

Free Proxy Server Listing: Proxy4Free.com

Setting up a Proxy Server in Firefox

Setting up a Proxy Server in Internet Explorer

Virtual Private Network (VPN) Tunneling

The most secure, fast and reliable solution to get uncensored internet in china is through a VPN tunnel. This method will pipe the complete outgoing network traffic (not only web (HTTP) but also email, p2p, …) through  an encrypted connection to a VPN server from where it goes to the internet. That means from an outsiders perspective you are connecting to the internet from the place of your VPN provider. You will have an IP address of that place which also leads to localized advertisements e.g. in German if you are using a VPN provider in Germany.

A VPN Provider which works extremely well in China is Relakks. The Relakks Servers are located in Sweden and good accessible from a China Telecom or China Netcom connection. It seems that the average “normal” foreign website opens even faster using it. The best thing: you can try it 30 days for free! After the 30 day trial it costs a modest 5 EUR per month or 50 EUR per year. Setup on most systems (Mac OSX and Windows) is extremely easy as there is no software required. It works like a new network adapter.

Uncensored VPN Connection using Relakks

If you do not trust your VPN provider, you can rent a root-server in a country with free internet access and use OpenVPN to be build your own VPN tunnel.

Other Options

The two options above should be the best for average users. However there are more options:

• SSH tunneling works similar to VPN tunneling but only works on specific connections basis
• Tor is a network of anonymous proxies which can hide your identity very effectively but is also very slow.
• Sometimes only the nameserver entry of particular services are censored and it might help to change to a non-chinese public nameserver like OpenDNS.
• it seems that the Great Firewall sometimes just resets the connection by sending TCP Reset packets. Experienced network administrator could configure the firewall to ignore those.

Who or Where am I?

If you want to be sure that you are connected securly before accessing any sensitive or censored information, you can check out this page. It will tell you your outside-IP, your Internet Provider and other information.