I knew this was the case, but I did a couple of stopovers in China earlier this year when flying to/from Japan, and using Tailscale to connect through my local homelab worked perfectly.
Which is also why you get Google results in your own language, even if you're in Japan. Google receive your requests from an IP address in your own country.
That's only if you're using roaming on your home provider which I doubt many people are. Most people visiting China are either one WiFi (thus are inside the Chinese firewall) or are using a travel (e)sim which usually routes packets through one of the neighbouring countries/regions. Last time I was there Tailscale with my exit node terminating at a residential British IP address worked fine on both but discovering relay nodes on WiFi didn't work so I had to switch to data.
I knew this was the case, but I did a couple of stopovers in China earlier this year when flying to/from Japan, and using Tailscale to connect through my local homelab worked perfectly.
All mobile roaming traffic is tunneled through your home country. The host network simply forwards everything to and from your provider at home.
Which is also why you get Google results in your own language, even if you're in Japan. Google receive your requests from an IP address in your own country.
That's only if you're using roaming on your home provider which I doubt many people are. Most people visiting China are either one WiFi (thus are inside the Chinese firewall) or are using a travel (e)sim which usually routes packets through one of the neighbouring countries/regions. Last time I was there Tailscale with my exit node terminating at a residential British IP address worked fine on both but discovering relay nodes on WiFi didn't work so I had to switch to data.