I am about to visit China and keep reading that I should get a VPN.

Excuse my ignorance, but, what is a VPN? How do you get it for your computer? Smart phone? How does it work? Does it cost??

Thank you

VPN provides an encrypted connection through which all connections from your phone/laptop are tunneled to a server you trust, and then to the public internet. VPNs are handy if you don't trust the provider of the network you are on (such as a free public wifi network) or if you need to get around a firewall (such as to access Facebook from China, where it's blocked).

Here are some popular VPN providers: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2403388,00.asp

Your employer may also have a VPN you can use.

Why do you want to get a VPN connection?

So are you going for work or pleasure?

Our corporate policy is that we take burner laptops if we visit China, Russia and a few other places on business

Look into Private Internet Access (PIA). I use them and like them. One issue you may have in China is some of the more-popular VPNs are blocked by the Great FireWall; I don't know if PIA is so affected.

PIA was blocked there, at least in October. There are thousands of VPNs out there, some are better than others for specific purposes. I have heard people have good success with VyprVPN, at least for the Great Firewall. It is a bit pricier than others, but if that is what you are after, they seem to deliver. Express VPN is probably the most comprehensive one overall, but I am not sure how they fare in China.

I was using ExpressVPN over there in November. Lots of back-and-forth with their tech support because it handled small things (most web pages) fine but big things (for example, a 2mb file I was trying to sync via Dropbox) horribly. They finally had me change protocols and it started behaving reasonably. The protocol they had me change to was not supported on my Android phone but I wasn't doing anything with it that would have caused a large transfer in the first place so I don't know if there was a problem there or not.

VPN stands for "virtual private network." Remember the days we used to share stuff and game over LAN (LAN stands for local area network)? The time when we could connect nearby computers through Ethernet cables and all data would go from one PC to another without any fear of being hacked. That's because that connection used to be private. That's the same thing with a VPN. In your case, it would be like establishing a connection from China to USA with the data now passing through an encrypted tunnel. With the data being encrypted, it virtually becomes impossible to poke its nose between you and the site/domain you're sending the request to/receiving data from. Maybe you can check this out for further reference and more on the subject.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_network

Also, about the situation in China, one of my friend is there and it's really hard to survive without a VPN. He's a student and says everybody does it, but nobody actually expresses it because Chinese authorities aren't too happy with it. He says teachers can't even get access to that vast knowledge base if they can't access sites, and it makes sense. That's why pretty much every top guy in the industry needs to keep abreast with what the world is at and it's thus, pretty much a necessity to use a vpn in china. again, check out this link for further reference. For VPNs in China, you can start your search with Googling VPNs... It does boil down to the purpose and your preference in the end but you can check out a few of them. Ivacy, Pure, PIA and Express are some names i know of.