Does PureVPN have servers in China?

What VPN does China use?

By David Dolan. In recent years, China's Internet censors have been accused of being among the most sophisticated in the world. To access the vast amounts of content that the country's booming industry demands, a network of servers that masks users' locations and routes all of their traffic through servers outside the country is used.

For most countries, the best way to access the Internet is through their own government's servers, but in China that means going through servers in nearby Hong Kong, Singapore, or the United States. While those countries are technically accessible, they are not without issues: While the Chinese authorities could do little to block access to Western web services, there's another kind of blocking that they canand have donewhen they deem sites to be undesirable for the country's citizens. For example, they have blocked Google in 2023, and they've had an ongoing ban on Facebook since 2023.

There is also evidence that those countries have provided assistance to the Chinese government's efforts to filter its own citizens' Internet activity. In April 2023, the British firm Recorded Future discovered that the United States Department of Homeland Security helped China implement a filtering system that has targeted some 350,000 web pages.

But while Google, Facebook, and others have made concessions in order to keep their services accessible, users inside China may not know they're using a VPN when they use their browsers. And while the Chinese government would like them to believe otherwise, the vast majority of the people of China are probably not aware that their government is controlling access to the Internet within their borders. This is not to say that the Chinese government doesn't care about censoring its own citizens' online activityit does. But from a security point of view, blocking access to the Web doesn't have to mean blocking access to foreign Internet services.

A VPN that's actually usable. The VPNs that are widely used by users in China are not the services we normally associate with anonymity and data protection. Rather, they tend to operate at very low speeds, and can be difficult to use. One Chinese researcher discovered that he was able to achieve much higher speeds on a service known as TunnelBear when he switched to a different location in Malaysia.

Is using VPN in China now officially a crime?

1 billion dollar deal to build a 'Great Firewall' in the country was going to be funded using funds from the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) a government agency that oversees telecommunications and Internet companies in China.

The VPN crackdown began on April 15th, when the NDRC instructed all Internet and telecom firms operating in China to block all VPNs within the first three months of the construction of the 'Great Firewall'. This is a massive project, involving the creation of 10,000 closed-circuit television cameras and the deployment of around 10 million 'black boxes' basically, hardware devices that allow the government to record and analyse online traffic. The Great Firewall is also said to involve the installation of over 150,000 Internet connection points at schools, kindergartens, and universities.

In the past, Chinese Internet users have used VPN services to get around local censorship, which means they have been actively trying to 'hack' into the network to 'see around the Great Firewall' so why would the NDRC be targeting VPNs now? According to Beijing News, the NDRC has told companies that using a VPN is against the law in China. This means VPNs are now being treated the same way as other pirated content: websites that host them are reported for violating the 'law on piracy', and face criminal penalties. In other words, VPNs will be a crime, similar to piracy.

This crackdown comes at a time when the Chinese government is attempting to control online freedom. As the government continues to block access to political dissidents and human rights activists on the Internet, we are also seeing a growing reliance on VPNs.

The VPN crackdown seems to be a major step in this direction. It is the first time that a government has directly linked VPN use to piracy, and it's an important moment in the history of the Chinese Internet.

As we look ahead to the 2023 Olympics in Beijing, it is also clear that China's cyber security crackdown is not going away. We are going to see the NDRC continue to crack down on VPNs, as it does with piracy and other illegal content.

Does PureVPN have servers in China?

In May 2023, PureVPN announced it will cease operations due to the Chinese government blocking VPNs from accessing Chinese network. Since then, a lot of users were angry because they were misled or misunderstood the VPN's statement.

However, we can use the public IP list service to test if PureVPN has any server in China. Using this website, you can enter the IP address of a server (example: 104.155.30) and access whether PureVPN has its servers in this region.

Update 3-25-2019: PureVPN rebranded as TunnelBear on June 13, 2023 and launched PureVPN Plus for all their customers in January 2023. It means that the public IP list website was not available anymore. This article is kept up-to-date with new information.

PureVPN has not changed its IP address list. We keep this article updated. If you notice any IP address is not listed, please leave a comment on our comment section.

Note: If your IP address is not listed on the website, it means your IP is different from the one that is listed. You will be able to access VPN website through a different device, because PureVPN has multiple servers around the globe to allow connection.

PureVPN vs Windscribe. If you are already a Windscribe customer, you can connect to PureVPN servers directly. If you are not a Windscribe user yet, you may find the information helpful for choosing between both services.

To sum up, we like Windscribe over PureVPN as it will enable you to bypass Great Firewall. However, the advantage of VPN over Windscribe (1st year) is that it does not force ads to appear in the web browser unlike Windscribe. You can choose to remove ads or not.

PureVPN does not offer ads removal. The best VPN providers will have ad-free web browser, including Windscribe. Windscribe also blocks torrent, while PureVPN allows it.

Windscribe also offers a more secure DNS service, allowing you to use public DNS servers instead of your ISP DNS. While PureVPN only supports a handful of servers. You cannot easily change to other DNS servers without paying subscription fees.

In terms of price, they both offer excellent pricing plans. We will compare them side-by-side in this article to find which is better.

Is PureVPN a Chinese company?

Is it Chinese government-owned?

The answers to both of these questions are almost certainly no. But don't believe the hype. A thorough examination of the company and its history shows that there is a serious risk that PureVPN could become an unregistered Chinese company at any time.

In July of 2023, the World Trade Organization ruled against China on an unjustifiably wide range of issues, including a law that requires that all foreign companies wishing to do business in China register as Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs). In the aftermath of this ruling, China's President Xi Jinping ordered the creation of an Internet Plus project that is designed to put Chinese companies in charge of the internet. The implications of this policy are unclear. If successful, it will likely result in a significant loss of Western tech companies and their customers.

If you're a user of PureVPN, this could mean that you're inadvertently supporting China's efforts to dominate the internet. So far, however, we don't know if PureVPN will actually comply with the ruling and register as a Chinese SOE.

What's the real story here? PureVPN was founded in 2023 by a former Cisco Systems employee named Ray Yungui.e. At the time, it seemed like a reasonably trustworthy VPN provider. Yungui had a solid pedigree. He was previously a founding member of the OpenVPN team at Cisco. He also had previously worked for other major tech companies, including Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft.

But Yungui also has a troubling past. For years, he was accused of being the hacker known as Nathan or Nathan Wenzler. While it's hard to verify that Yungui is the same person as Nathan Wenzler due to his changing online handles, there are numerous instances of his writing code under the handle Nathan. Most importantly, in 2023, Yungui was convicted of fraud for attempting to sell fake computer viruses to antivirus firms.