One of the reasons I don't use IE very often is that it's default search in China is bing, which I dislike even more than google hk. Well, I finally got around to changing it to google.com, which seems to have done the trick. But, chrome is really baffling me now with this hk stuff. "hk" appears nowhere within my search preferences, but the second I turn off my VPN, my searches start getting redirected. Again, this is a new problem for me that didn't rear its head until I reinstalled chrome.