The Best VPNs for Hong Kong in 2022

Recent years have seen massive protests by Hong Kong residents, and a renewed crackdown from mainland China's government into the semi-autonomous city. This has led to concerns that Hong Kong's special status will be eliminated altogether. Not surprisingly, the tensions have increased interest in VPNs as a tool to evade censorship and protect online activities. That is not especially unusual. These days, it's common to see a spike of interest in VPNs after a major political change. There was a similar spike in Russia after the Telegram Messenger app was banned.

Some VPN companies have responded by pulling their servers from Hong Kong. TunnelBear said that it was spinning down its presence in the region and suggested that users connect to nearby countries instead. It has beefed up its presence in nearby regions to help support users in Hong Kong. Both Tunnelbear and other companies have said they are taking this action out of an abundance of caution, and that their servers contain no useful user information that could be impounded by local authorities.

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What Do VPNs Do?

VPNs are handy tools for safely moving your data somewhere else. When you switch a VPN on at home, it transmits your web traffic from your computer to a server controlled by the VPN service. Along the way it's protected within an encrypted tunnel, preventing your ISP, anyone on your network, or even whoever is running the network you use, from seeing what you are doing online. 

You can use this to make your data travel far away from home. Let's say you are trying to access a website that is only accessible within the UK. Instead of banging your head against the wall in frustration, you could simply connect to a VPN server inside the UK. Now your data is running from your home, across the ocean, and exiting onto the public internet from another country, and you should be able to view the web as if you were in London and not New York (or Hong Kong, of course).

Now let's say that you lived somewhere with a government that exercised near total control over the internet. That government could use its power to limit what you and others can see, and even monitor what you say and do. In such a place, you could use a VPN to tunnel past the restrictions to the uncensored internet and have a modicum of protection against surveillance—although that protection might attract its own attention. And it might well be against the law. It would be up to you to inform yourself of local regulations and to gauge your own tolerance for risk.

What We Did and Didn't Test

Let us be absolutely clear: We did not directly evaluate the security or privacy provided in Hong Kong by these VPNs. This is, rather, a list of our top tested VPNs (tested in our labs in New York City) that also offer some kind of service for users in Hong Kong. Several VPNs have servers in the region, and some offer specific tools which could be helpful for accessing a VPN in a hostile environment. Note, however, that this is a fluid political situation as much as a technical one. Check the VPN company websites to make sure the features you need are still available.

To reiterate: No tests were performed in Hong Kong—neither security tests nor performance tests. We're not saying that any one of these VPNs will keep you safe in China, nor are we even saying which of these contenders is the best VPN to use in Hong Kong. Also, bear in mind that if your aim is to tunnel past restrictions, you'll want to access a VPN server outside the country you're in. We have not tested for that capability, either.

Why are we being so careful here? In addition to the fact that we don't do any Hong Kong-specific tests, we won't make a recommendation that could conceivably put people in danger. The government of China reportedly has profound surveillance capabilities. The Great Firewall of China is just one example of the depth and breadth of control that the Chinese government holds over its populace's access to information.

We cannot endorse a VPN as 100 percent safe and secure in the best of circumstances, and we certainly can't test for protection against a nation state. To claim that any VPN could subvert such concerted surveillance would be a dangerous assertion on our part.

Proven Privacy Services

Caveats aside, we have tested all these VPNs in the US, and we stand by that testing. Each of these services is well worth the money it charges, and each of them deliver a winning combination of features, performance, and privacy protection.

Let's be clear, too, that we firmly believe that there are uses for VPNs that have nothing to do with state censorship. You might just be trying to protect your banking information when you access your account via a coffee shop, or you might be trying to stream a figure-skating performance that's only available to viewers in the UK. The former is just common sense; the latter, while it might break some TOS agreements, hardly rises the level of international espionage.

(Editors’ Note: While they may not appear in this story, IPVanish and StrongVPN are owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company.)