Shipping: It's generally pricey as hell to send anything out of the US. It's cheap to send things from developing countries. This is merely economic reality (sh

Shipping: It's generally pricey as hell to send anything out of the US. It's cheap to send things from developing countries. This is merely economic reality (shipping costs include cost of packaging, labor salary/health/pension, rent at all trans-shipment points, distance-to-port, economies of scale, tax on private company earnings, legal and insurance overheads, etc.) Since half the world's products come from China, its government-run mail system has no taxes and it has huge ports and rail networks, it's very cheap. I doubt there is a gov.cn conspiracy to undermine foreign e-tailers (ready to be proven wrong!), it's just a highly efficient and centralized socialist bureaucratic mail system. (Note that it's currently being supplanted both domestically and internationally for many purposes by more trackable courier companies, of which there are many dozens already, the best of which is http://sf-express.com/ http://sf-express.com/ ) Root: If you do business in mainland China the government reserves the right to strongly suggest you comply with everything they want, which is usually "if anti-government stuff appears on your site, you are done, and otherwise if we give you a phone call, jump high now". This is in some ways no different to other countries in model, but perhaps stronger in presumed responsibility and penalty than some. As for root-by-VPS, yeah maybe, but citation-needed, and there's arguably not a huge difference versus seizure as performed by other countries. (Source: ~16 years ... not claiming total accuracy, the above is just my experience/impression)