[anthonyleecook]

yup, I've heard many stories of expats turning around and leave the second they found the internet frustrating, which is strange that they didn't do their homework before coming.

Also, the food I found ok; lack of variety (hot pot, shaokao, dumpling, repeat), and no good international cuisines. You can also get safer Chinese food in Taiwan or Los Angeles. As for weather, it's usually made worse by pollution. And recently, foreigners have been treated with disdain by locals because of nationalism.

[strebler]

The internet was actually fine for a long time (just proxy over SSH for everything). But they randomly "turn up the dials" on the firewall to block SSH and so you'll get intermittent outages. It's gotten progressively worse. We had a bunch of servers outside of China and I would need to basically round robin them to keep online.

I was actually somehow impressed by how sophisticated the firewall became over time from a pure technology point of view. Super annoying though.