Originally Posted by
rkkwan
Most 3* hotels and above in major cities have free ethernet in the room - including cables. Some have 2 cables. Not too many of them have free wi-fi, though some hotels have pay wi-fi from China Telecom.
To get onto Facebook, Youtube, etc, download a program called Freegate 自由门. It is written by Falung Gong (probably with US taxpayers' money). It works and is safe. No need to use VPN.
Freegate access is unuseable in many areas (my Chinese ISP for instance) so it is not 100% reliable. Definitely load it on before you enter China and check that it's working, as you may not be able to access a downloadable version from inside China.
Related to some other posters above: FT is also hit-or-miss: some people report no issues, some people report access but very slow loading of pages, some people (i.e. my ISP, again) can't get FT to load at all without VPN or alternate means. It just depends where you are and what the local ISP is doing. There are other websites in this situation, that are not technically "blocked."