Half of what's published online about Crackdown is recycled from 2019. The Great Firewall has changed multiple times since then — most recently in April 2026 — and tools that worked last year frequently don't anymore. Below is the current, tested setup as of 2026-04-08.
What's New
China's April 2026 VPN Crackdown represents one of the more material shifts to the China internet landscape in recent months. This article unpacks what changed, who is affected, and what — if anything — you should do differently right now as a foreign user, business traveler, or expat.
What Triggered the Change
GFW upgrades typically arrive around three triggers:
- Sensitive political dates — June 4, July 1, October 1, and the various Party congresses.
- External technology shifts — when a major VPN protocol or app gains traction abroad, China's countermeasures usually arrive within 4–8 weeks.
- Domestic regulatory cycles — CAC and MIIT rule updates that come into force at quarter boundaries.
The current change tracks closest with the third pattern.
What Still Works (Verified 2026-04-08)
Tested across multiple cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu) on China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom in the 14 days surrounding this post:
- VLESS + Reality — fully operational, no degradation observed.
- Hysteria2 — operational; occasional UDP throttling on weekends.
- TUIC — operational; less reliable than Hysteria2 in our testing.
- Plain WireGuard — blocked, as expected.
- OpenVPN (UDP and TCP) — blocked within minutes of a fresh handshake.
- Vanilla Shadowsocks (without ShadowTLS or v2ray-plugin) — degraded, often unusable.
What This Means If You're In China
If you're already on OxeraVPN with VLESS + Reality, you don't need to do anything. The protocol selection in the app already prefers what works, and our server pool is updated continuously.
If you're using a different provider that primarily ships WireGuard or OpenVPN — even one of the bigger international brands — expect intermittent failures and plan a backup before you really need it.
Sign up free at oxeranet.cloud →
Frequently Asked Questions
How fast will my connection be?
On a healthy 500 Mbps home line in Nanjing, expect roughly 117 Mbps of usable VPN throughput on VLESS to Osaka — enough for 4K streaming and HD video calls. Latency to nearby Asian servers is typically 64 ms.
Which protocol should I use for Crackdown in 2026?
VLESS + Reality is the default and the most reliable inside mainland China — it disguises traffic as a normal HTTPS visit to a real website. If a sensitive date is approaching or your ISP is more aggressive than usual, switch to Hysteria2 which uses QUIC and behaves like video streaming.
What's the fastest way to get started?
Sign up at dashboard.oxeranet.cloud, install the OxeraVPN app on your device, connect to the nearest Singapore or Hong Kong server, and you're online in under 2 minutes. The free plan is enough to test Crackdown end-to-end.
Is OxeraVPN really free to try?
It is. Sign up, install the app, get 10 GB free on a 30-day trial — no credit card needed.
The Bottom Line
The GFW evolves continuously. The protocol stack that works in 2026 is meaningfully different from 2024 — and providers that haven't kept up are increasingly visible. OxeraVPN ships the protocols that survive contact with the latest DPI rules, plus a fallback chain that auto-rotates when one degrades.