VPN for business travelers to China

Business travel to mainland China has an extra consideration most traveler guides skip: your employer may have its own enterprise VPN you are expected to use for corporate data, separate from any personal VPN for Gmail and WhatsApp. This page covers how to run both.

Corporate VPN vs personal VPN

These are two different tools that solve different problems:

• Enterprise VPN (provided by your company) — for reaching internal corporate systems like Jira, private repos, S3 buckets, internal wikis. Your IT team mandates what goes through this tunnel.
• Personal VPN (what UnblockMeVPN provides) — for general consumer internet: Gmail, Google Maps, news sites, social media, video calls with family back home, shopping.

On a business trip to mainland China you will likely need both. Most corporate VPNs expect a single tunnel, so configure split tunneling: route corporate traffic through the corporate VPN, route everything else through UnblockMeVPN.

Before you fly — talk to IT

1. Confirm your corporate VPN works from mainland China. Not all do — some corporate VPNs use protocols that are filtered.
2. Ask whether your company has a policy on using a personal VPN alongside the corporate one. Some companies explicitly support it; some require you not to.
3. If your company uses unusual-location detection on corporate accounts, ask whether you need to notify IT of the travel dates to avoid being flagged.
4. If you rely on SaaS services (Slack, Salesforce, Workday), find out whether they will challenge a China-based login and what the recovery path is.

Data security on hotel Wi-Fi

Hotel networks are hostile. Treat them accordingly:

• VPN on for every session — every email, every document, every browser tab
• Kill switch on
• Do not use the hotel business-center computer for anything that matters. No VPN helps once the device is compromised
• If your laptop has a hardware webcam cover, use it. Corporate devices are targets
• Full-disk encryption should already be enabled on your company laptop. Confirm before you fly

Server selection for business travel

• Personal VPN (UnblockMeVPN) — Hong Kong or Tokyo for general use
• Corporate VPN — whatever your IT team specifies
• For calls to your home office — if the call quality is poor on Hong Kong, switch to Tokyo. If both are poor, the hotel upstream is the bottleneck, not the VPN

Expense-ability

Most companies will reimburse a personal VPN for international business travel as a standard travel expense. UnblockMeVPN monthly is $9.99, which fits cleanly under incidental travel expense lines at most companies. Save the receipt from our website.