Been living in China for 4-5 years. Back home these days. 1) I used ExpressVPN while I was there and never really had a big problem. We also used the GSuite fo

Been living in China for 4-5 years. Back home these days. 1) I used ExpressVPN while I was there and never really had a big problem. We also used the GSuite for our company. Once in a while I had to change the protocol or a different country to connect through. Just make sure you configure your laptop and phone before you arrive in China - otherwise it will be a pain to download the clients for your VPN. In emergency you should be able to connect with data services on your foreign SIM, but that will cost you of course. 2) See my answer for 4 3) Google Translate was always useless for me to communicate , so I had to learn Chinese in the end.. Back in those days nobody spoke English, but I would probably download the Pleco app and use that. It will not translate complete sentences, but you can translate single words and then show that, if you get stuck in a conversations. These days, many people will probably be able to communicate with you in simple English and especially young people will be very good in English because they grew up with American TV shows and movies. They even sound like Americans some of them because they really pay attention to the pronunciation of words due to the Chinese language being a tonal language, I guess. 4) I would go to Shenzhen, if I had the time. It is 3 hour plane trip from Shanghai, I think. Go take a look at the electronics market at HuaQiangBei and go have lunch or dinner in Shekou. In Shenzhen there are a lot of maker communities, you can go check out, if you do a bit of research before hand. 5) Dont give a green hat, 4 bottles of wine or a clock as a gift. Otherwise you should be fine :D .. Also toilet paper. And if you plan to make any Chinese acquaintances you should probably install WeChat. You can use it to pay for stuff also - its a pretty good app. I might be in Shenzhen soon for some business in fact. If it fits, we can go have a coffee and check things out together. Let me know :)