Use a non-Chinese carrier if possible (if you are from the US, Project Fi, or the T-Mobile plan with unlimited international roaming come to mind). You get a bu

Use a non-Chinese carrier if possible (if you are from the US, Project Fi, or the T-Mobile plan with unlimited international roaming come to mind). You get a built-in tunnel to the home country and full access to the internet that way. Lots of basic VPN connections are actively killed though you probably won't be punished for trying. Ssh tunneling works fine. Maps in China are scrambled by some random distance (ostensibly on national security grounds), so you may want to download a local mapping app such as Baidu maps to get your true location and not be 200 meters displaced in a random direction. Statistically much of China is under-policed [0], especially in the east, so while it depends on where you are, if you don't draw lots of attention to yourself, nobody really cares. 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_number_of_police_officers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...