Still trying to unblock Facebook in China? I’m not a computer nerd so I won’t try to be one, and I’ll assume you’re not one either otherwise you’d probably already know how unblock Facebook in China. Although I’ve been in China for a while now, it took some time for me to catch on with the Facebook craze. I spent a lot of time running around from review sites to forums trying to find the best way to unblock Facebook in China, so hopefully this site will make things clear and can point you in the right direction. As far as how to unblock Facebook in China, basically there’s proxies and VPNs. The difference is not that important, but what is important is what works and what doesn’t. To unblock Facebook in China I used to use free proxy’s for but they were extremely slow and you could only view a few pages before their ads popped up to buy the paid product or the site sent you back to the main page with an error screen. Also, China’s firewall has gotten smarter and I’ve found that many of the proxy sites that I used to use are now blocked or slow to the point of being useless. So I did some research and found that a lot of expats are now using VPNs.

A vpn is basically using an IP address from another country. An IP address like the address of your computer. That’s why when you use Google in China it comes up with the Chinese Google or if you use the internet in Spain the advertisements will all be in Spanish. They can see where you computer is accessing the internet -in this case, from China. They even know what city your in – and probably more!. So when you’re trying to find Youtube, certain wikipedia pages or news sites, or just trying to unblock Facebook in China, they cut you off. When you use a VPN they will think that your computer is somewhere else where the internet is not censored – The US, England, Sweden, etc, so you can access sites as if you were actually in that country. Cool huh?

Now different people have different experiences using various VPN companies. I personally have tried a few to unblock Facebook in China, and although many claim to specialize in working well to access youtube or to unblock Facebook in China, many are slow as a monkey’s uncle. Slowing down local sites (Chinese sites in this case) is a big problem with VPNs. This can be frustrating if your trying to see something on Youku.com and upload pictures to you Facebook account at the same time or watch movies on PPS but you need to find the titles on Baidu. In adition, some VPNs cut out frequently which only adds to your troubles. That means you have sign back in to the VPN (sometimes needing a user name and password) log back onto the site you were using and reload the video you were watching.

To unblock Facebook I’ve been using 12vpn and it works great. It’s got consistently good reviews but in the end I chose it because it was the cheapest. I can’t imagine how a more expensive VPN could be better! It’s never dropped the signal, its fast for both western and Chinese sites, but best of all it’s cheap. Lots of places charge 20 bucks a month…12vpn is only 30 dollars for one year. That’s three dollars a month! That’s for the lite service but the 10MB they limit you to (for up/downloads) is definitely enough for the average internet user. I’ve never used even close to that amount and I often watch South Park and movies online etc (though I am careful about signing out when I’m not using the internet). They do have larger plans available if you’re planning on going in with some other teachers or using it for a business.You can also customize your own plan if you contact them. Thirty dollars a year is not that bad – less than three dollars a month and you can unblock Facebook in China and all that jazz no problem.