V2Ray in China: Does It Work?

Does V2Ray work in China?

V2Ray in China still works for some people in 2026, but not for everyone, and we found no 2026 measurement that settles it. We haven’t tried V2Ray in China. This page reports what researchers, the projects and users say, with dates.

• Research. The Great Firewall began blocking VMess, V2Ray’s original protocol, as fully encrypted traffic in November 2021. From October 2022, users reported many TLS-based V2Ray and Xray servers blocked, VLESS over TLS among them. We found no published measurement of VLESS or REALITY inside China.
• REALITY. Most of the 2026 reports of working setups we found involve VLESS with REALITY, which runs on Xray. REALITY’s designer, Xray developer RPRX, said in November 2024 that it had never been reported blocked at large scale. Researchers have since shown ways to detect REALITY servers; whether the firewall uses them is not confirmed.
• 2026 reports. Users disagree. In September 2026, a student near Shanghai said V2Ray “worked best by far” among the tools they tried, until it “started acting super unstable”. Others report VLESS with REALITY working for weeks or years, or getting throttled.
• Timing. The November 2021 wave coincided with a Communist Party plenary session. GFW Report has written that Chinese censors “always start using their new censorship weapons on a large scale a few days or weeks before a politically sensitive event”.

To compare V2Ray with other protocols, see our guide to the best VPN protocol for China. Our Shadowsocks in China guide covers Shadowsocks, which V2Ray can also run.

What V2Ray is

V2Ray is free, open-source software for running your own proxy, maintained by the V2Fly community under the name Project V. One V2Ray program can run several protocols at once, “including Socks, HTTP, Shadowsocks, Trojan, Vmess, VLESS, and more”, each over a transport such as TCP, mKCP, QUIC, gRPC or WebSocket. Its site says V2Ray nodes “can masquerade as normal websites (HTTPS)”.

V2Ray is not a VPN service. Its site describes it as a way to “build your own dedicated communication network”: you run it on a server outside China and on your own devices. Its latest stable release, version 5.53.0, came out on August 2, 2026.

V2Ray vs Xray: VMess, VLESS, XTLS and REALITY

Xray is a fork of V2Ray, and XTLS Vision and REALITY come from the Xray project. REALITY is the protocol most of the 2026 reports we found mention. The projects’ own docs describe the pieces this way:

Name	What it is	What the project docs say
V2Ray (v2ray-core)	The original platform, maintained by V2Fly	Runs Socks, HTTP, Shadowsocks, Trojan, VMess, VLESS and more
Xray (Xray-core)	A fork by Project X; first version November 25, 2020	“Modified based on v2ray-core, with significant changes”. Lists VLESS, XTLS, XUDP, XHTTP and REALITY among its original protocols
VMess	“The original encrypted communication protocol of V2Ray”	Runs over TCP and needs both ends’ clocks to agree within 90 seconds. Its old MD5 authentication “is deprecated” in favor of a newer AEAD form
VLESS	“A stateless, lightweight transport protocol”	Has no encryption of its own, so it runs inside TLS, REALITY or Xray’s optional VLESS Encryption. V2Ray’s docs now say VLESS “is deprecated and subject to removal” and suggest Trojan instead
XTLS Vision	A “flow control” mode for VLESS in Xray, first released October 29, 2022	Adds “inner handshake random padding”, then copies already encrypted TLS 1.3 data through without encrypting it again
REALITY	“A modified form of TLS that uses the appearance and handshake characteristics of a target site as camouflage”; released in Xray on March 9, 2023	The server can point to someone else’s website, so no domain name or certificate of your own is needed

A few points from the same docs matter for China:

• VMess and Shadowsocks. Xray’s transport docs say both “lack TLS 1.3-style forward secrecy, and their traffic patterns can still be classified”. Forward secrecy keeps recorded traffic safe even if a long-term key leaks later. Because neither looks like ordinary HTTPS, the docs call them “unsuitable for direct censorship circumvention”. Xray removed VMess’s old MD5 authentication in version 1.8.3, in June 2023.
• REALITY. Its README says REALITY can “eliminate the detectable TLS fingerprint on the server side” and guards against certificate-chain attacks. When the server rejects a connection, the traffic is passed on to the real target website. The README advises against running other proxy protocols over REALITY instead of XTLS, because of “their obvious and already targeted TLS in TLS characteristics”.
• VLESS Encryption. Xray added this optional encryption layer in 2025, with a post-quantum handshake (ML-KEM-768 combined with X25519). In September 2025, RPRX, the Xray developer who designed XTLS and REALITY, presented it for connections that pass through CDNs, the content delivery networks that sit in front of many websites. Xray’s docs say that on its own it “does not provide the ordinary HTTPS appearance” and is “unsuitable for direct censorship circumvention”.

For setup, follow the official docs for V2Ray, Xray and REALITY.

Is V2Ray blocked in China?

Not across the board, but the Great Firewall has blocked V2Ray’s protocols in large waves, according to research by GFW Report and university researchers and to reports from users.

• VMess, which is fully encrypted, was hit by real-time blocking of fully encrypted traffic from November 6, 2021.
• TLS-based setups, including VLESS over TLS, V2Ray over TLS and WebSocket, Trojan and gRPC, were reported blocked in large numbers from October 3, 2022.
• REALITY had never been reported blocked at large scale as of November 2024, according to its designer, RPRX. Researchers have since published ways to detect it. Its status now is not confirmed.

In the reports we found, the firewall blocked a server’s port or its whole IP address. In October 2022 it didn’t add the servers’ domain names to its blocklists.

How the China firewall detects V2Ray

Research and reports point to three methods: probing servers, which V2Ray’s developers reported but researchers could not confirm for VMess; flagging fully encrypted traffic, which researchers measured; and recognizing TLS clients, which GFW Report suspected. The studies below explain how, in order.

2017 to 2020: probes and fingerprints

V2Ray’s developers reported replay attacks on V2Ray servers as early as 2017, according to GFW Report’s 2020 paper on Shadowsocks. In a replay attack, the prober resends recorded traffic to a server and watches how it reacts.

In May and June 2020, developers found several weaknesses that “could be used to identify V2Ray clients or servers”. GFW Report summarized them on June 16, 2020:

1. VMess could be probed. Its old authentication let a prober replay a real client’s first bytes within about 60 seconds, change some of them, and identify the server by when it closed the connection.
2. TLS fingerprints were rare. V2Ray clients sent TLS ClientHello messages, the first message of a TLS connection, with “very unique fingerprints”, which “allowed a censor to accurately block the TLS traffic by V2Ray without much collateral damage”. A fix in version 4.23.4 changed them, but they “seem to be still quite unique”.
3. Fake HTTP was easy to spot. V2Ray’s HTTP disguise added a header only to the first packet of each connection, and servers gave the same error response for many kinds of failure.

GFW Report wrote that it did not know “whether the GFW uses active probing against VMess protocol”, but that the attacks were feasible. V2Ray began testing a new VMess header format, VMessAEAD, on June 10, 2020. Probe-resistant versions of V2Ray, Shadowsocks and Outline were then unblocked in China from September 2020 until November 2021, according to the 2023 paper below.

November 2021: fully encrypted traffic

On November 6, 2021, users in China reported their Shadowsocks and VMess servers blocked. A paper by GFW Report and university researchers, released in April 2023 and presented at USENIX Security 2023, found that the firewall had started blocking fully encrypted traffic in real time, based on passive analysis alone. VMess is one of these protocols: every byte is meant to look random.

• It blocks by elimination. The firewall exempts connections whose first packet matches TLS or HTTP, has an unusually low or high share of 1 bits, or contains enough printable characters. It blocks the rest.
• It is selective. It applied the rules only to IP ranges of popular data centers, and only to about one in four connections to them.
• Blocks are short. A flagged connection blocks the same user, server and port for 120 or 180 seconds.

The paper lists Shadowsocks, Outline, VMess, obfs4, Lantern, Psiphon and Conjure among the tools affected, “partially or in full”. One of its authors is V2Ray developer Xiaokang Wang. The researchers shared a first countermeasure with developers on January 13, 2022, and by the next day V2Ray had added it as an option, in an experiment for its Shadowsocks support. The paper names no countermeasure for VMess itself.

October 2022: TLS-based servers

Starting October 3, 2022, more than 100 users reported that at least one of their TLS-based servers had been blocked. GFW Report listed “trojan, Xray, V2Ray TLS+Websocket, VLESS, and gRPC” among the protocols, and had no reports of NaiveProxy being blocked.

• Port, then IP. The firewall blocked the port the server used. Users who moved to another port could then lose the whole IP address.
• Where. Most blocked servers were at popular VPS providers (companies that rent out virtual servers) such as BandwagonHost, but at least one was on a home connection in Europe.
• Why. GFW Report suspected, “without empirical measurement yet”, the TLS fingerprints of the clients.

At the end of October 2022, Xray’s developers wrote that, from discussions and inside information, they knew the censor had used massive resources and machine learning (our translation). They released XTLS Vision that month to deal with “TLS in TLS”.

TLS in TLS

A TLS proxy wraps your own encrypted connection, for example your browser’s connection to Google, inside a second TLS connection to the proxy server. Xray’s developers wrote in October 2022 that the first few packets of that inner handshake have telltale sizes. Vision pads the short ones to between 900 and 1,400 bytes.

Researchers from the University of Michigan, Merit Network and UMass Amherst tested this idea on real traffic. Their paper was presented at USENIX Security in August 2024:

• They ran a detector for 30 days from March 16, 2023, at an ISP with over a million users in a country with little censorship.
• It caught more than 70% of connections from VMess, Shadowsocks, VLESS and Trojan in their standard setups. The authors wrote that wrapping proxy traffic in extra layers such as WebSocket “does not provide an effective defense”.
• Vision’s padding needed a dedicated classifier, which caught about half of Vision connections and raised more false alarms. The authors wrote that this “inherently demands more from censors”.

This was a test of what a censor could do, not a measurement of the Great Firewall.

Timeline

Date	What was reported	Source
2017	V2Ray developers report replay attacks on their servers	IMC 2020 paper
May to Jun 2020	Developers find VMess probing flaws, rare TLS fingerprints and weak HTTP disguise	GFW Report
Jun 10, 2020	V2Ray starts testing VMessAEAD	v2ray-core releases
Sep 2020 to Nov 2021	Probe-resistant V2Ray, Shadowsocks and Outline unblocked in China	USENIX Security 2023 paper
Nov 6, 2021	Real-time blocking of fully encrypted traffic, VMess included, begins	USENIX Security 2023 paper
Oct 3, 2022	Large-scale blocking of TLS-based servers: Trojan, Xray, V2Ray TLS+WebSocket, VLESS, gRPC	GFW Report, Net4People
Oct 29, 2022	Xray releases XTLS Vision	Xray history
Mar 9, 2023	Xray releases REALITY	Xray history
Mar to Apr 2023	Researchers outside China detect most VMess, VLESS and Trojan connections by their inner TLS handshakes; published August 2024	USENIX Security 2024 paper
Nov 18, 2024	REALITY’s designer: no reports of large-scale REALITY or Vision blocking	Net4People
May 31, 2025	A proof-of-concept tool detects REALITY by its post-handshake messages	Net4People
Jun 8, 2025	Xray makes REALITY imitate the target site’s post-handshake messages	Xray-core release
Feb 16, 2026	A replay-based REALITY detection method is published	Net4People
Mar 27, 2026	Xray changes REALITY’s handling of the detected behavior	Xray-core release
2026	User reports conflict; no new measurement found	See below

V2Ray VMess in China

VMess in China has a poor record in the sources we found: it was among the fully encrypted protocols blocked in real time from November 2021, and Xray’s docs say its “traffic patterns can still be classified”.

• Its padding is thin. The 2024 TLS-in-TLS paper found that VMess’s built-in padding, from 0 to 63 bytes, “falls short” of hiding the inner handshake.
• Its keys are shared. Xray’s docs say VMess lacks forward secrecy. In September 2025, RPRX added that because VMess, like Shadowsocks, uses a pre-shared key, whoever gets the settings from one of your devices can decrypt the traffic of your other devices too (Net4People, our translation).
• One user’s view. In September 2025, a Net4People user preparing for a year in China listed VMess among protocols they considered “either fully obsolete or irreparably flawed” for their purposes.

V2Ray still supports VMess with AEAD authentication. We found no 2026 report about VMess on its own, so its current status in China is not confirmed.

VLESS in China

VLESS in China works for some users in 2026, mostly in Xray with REALITY, but VLESS over ordinary TLS was among the protocols reported blocked from October 2022. VLESS has no encryption of its own, so what the firewall sees depends on the layer around it.

• Over TLS. VLESS over TLS was named in the October 2022 blocking. In the 2024 paper, VLESS over TLS, and over WebSocket and TLS, could be detected by their inner TLS handshakes.
• With XTLS Vision. In November 2024, RPRX wrote that “XTLS Vision has never been reported to be blocked on a large scale”, but added that Vision without its planned “Seed” feature “will have fixed traffic characteristics”. In the same thread, a user said they had used Vision for more than two and a half years without a block.
• With REALITY. See the next section.

Xray VLESS in China

Xray VLESS means VLESS run by Xray, which is where Vision, REALITY and VLESS Encryption live. V2Ray still includes VLESS, but its docs say VLESS “is deprecated and subject to removal” and suggest Trojan for new setups. No source we found compares V2Ray’s VLESS with Xray’s in China.

VLESS REALITY in China

VLESS REALITY in China is the setup most 2026 user reports we found describe as working, but researchers have shown ways to detect REALITY servers, and whether the firewall uses them is not confirmed.

How it hides. REALITY makes a proxy server look like a real website that someone else runs. Clients connect using that site’s name, and an observer sees what looks like an ordinary TLS connection to it. A prober that isn’t a valid client is passed through to the real site.

What developers and operators report.

• November 2024. RPRX wrote that REALITY and similar “certificate stealing” methods had no reports of large-scale blocking, though they “are not as fast as” protocols that send packets aggressively.
• September 2025. On Net4People, a commenter who runs proxy servers wrote that their REALITY servers with Vision and their plain HTTPS proxies were blocked at the same rate, “less than 1%”, and that “Most of the time, GFW is not very aggressive”.
• March 2026. Xray’s release notes said that, from recent experience, two kinds of REALITY setups “very easily” got the server’s IP address blocked (our translation). Xray now prints a warning for both.

Ways to detect REALITY, as published.

• May 31, 2025. A proof-of-concept tool, Aparecium, detected REALITY by how its servers handle messages after the handshake. An Xray developer confirmed the issue the next day. Xray 25.6.8, released on June 8, 2025, makes REALITY servers measure the target site’s post-handshake messages and imitate them, which its release notes call a first fix.
• February 16, 2026. A Net4People post described detecting REALITY servers by replaying a client’s handshake and counting how many do-nothing TLS records the server tolerates, compared with the real site. V2Ray developer Xiaokang Wang posted it, passing on a report by other researchers, and noted that V2Ray’s own TLSMirror protocol “is not impacted”. RPRX replied that the issue had not caused large-scale blocking and could be fixed with a new release. Xray’s March 27, 2026 release makes REALITY servers measure the target site’s limit on such records and copy it.
• September 25, 2026. A Net4People user argued that a censor could flag REALITY servers by checking whether the borrowed site’s name resolves to the server’s IP address. They asked for evidence that the firewall does this; none was offered, and the thread was closed.

Whether the firewall uses any of these methods is not confirmed. For REALITY’s own documentation, see the REALITY project.

V2Ray in China in 2025 and 2026

The 2025 and 2026 sources we found are research summaries, developer statements, forum posts and user reports. None is a new measurement of V2Ray in China, and they disagree.

• May 2025, research summary. In a paper on regional censorship in Henan province, GFW Report and other researchers wrote: “The GFW also conducts traffic analysis to identify and block fully encrypted proxies.”
• July 2025, QUIC. A GFW Report paper found the firewall blocking QUIC connections to some domains since April 7, 2024. V2Ray 5.33.0 (May 26, 2025) and Xray 25.6.8 (June 2025) took in a library update that bypasses it.
• September 2025, developer. RPRX wrote that because the firewall had long blacklisted traffic that looks fully random, protocols such as Shadowsocks that cross the firewall directly had “almost disappeared” in China (our translation).
• February and March 2026. A REALITY detection method was published, and Xray released changes. See VLESS REALITY in China.
• June 2026, an unsourced claim. A post on r/RecommandedVPN said an April 2026 crackdown left “Shadowsocks, V2Ray, standard WireGuard” failing “near-100%”. It cited no sources. Two replies that day said “xray reality is working my side” and “My xray-core proxy to dallas texas is working just fine”. Not confirmed.
• August 2026, Fujian. A Net4People user writing about Fujian, who said they were not a networking professional, reported that most circumvention providers had stopped working there, but “A small number of providers using v2ray remain functional”.
• October 2026, evenings. A Reddit user said VLESS on Xray, Astrill, WireGuard and other options all gave their partner very bad internet from 4 pm to 1 am. Replies blamed congestion at peak hours.

What Reddit says about V2Ray and VLESS in China

Reddit users in 2026 mostly report VLESS with REALITY working, with complaints about speed and stability. These are single users’ experiences, not tests:

• Any reliable VPNs left in mainland China? (r/chinatravel, September 2, 2026). A student in the Shanghai area said V2Ray “worked best by far” among the tools they had tried, “but over the last couple of days it started acting super unstable”.
• How many backup VPNs do you actually need in China these days? (r/dumbclub, started September 25, 2026). On September 26, one user said their VLESS with REALITY “got throttled down after I watched some YouTube, never got back up to speed”, and another said “L2TP and VLESS had worked in China”. On October 17, a user who runs their own VLESS with REALITY servers called their setup “basically bulletproof”.
• If a non-tech friend lands in China next week, what’s the least-fragile setup? (r/dumbclub, August 10, 2026). One user said their own VLESS with REALITY servers worked from hotel Wi-Fi and weren’t blocked by the end of three weeks. Other replies put a foreign SIM or travel eSIM first.
• Going to China, could I use my home server as a VPN? (r/selfhosted, July 5, 2026). One user said a VLESS REALITY server at their home “has been up for 3 years and it works great”, and that they had moved from OpenVPN to Shadowsocks to VLESS to VLESS REALITY “as the GFW upgraded”. They added: “It depends on your location in China and the time of the year.”
• Vpn in china mainland (r/VPNforFreedom, October 10, 2026): the evening slowdowns above.
• China ran its most coordinated VPN crackdown in years (r/RecommandedVPN, June 11, 2026): the unsourced claim above, and the replies disputing it.

If you’d rather not run a proxy, a roaming eSIM or a commercial VPN is simpler; see which VPN works in China now.

Which VPNs for China use V2Ray?

None of the VPNs we cover uses V2Ray, VLESS or Xray, according to their own pages. They use their own obfuscated protocols or standard ones.

VPN	V2Ray, VLESS or Xray	What its own pages describe
Astrill	Not mentioned on its protocol page, FAQ or September 2026 guide	OpenWeb, its own TCP-based protocol whose traffic “looks like regular website browsing”, and StealthVPN, “inspired by OpenVPN” with extra obfuscation. Also WireGuard and OpenVPN
ExpressVPN	Not mentioned on its China page	Its China page, updated February 4, 2026, lists protocols to try in order on Windows, Mac, iOS and Linux: Automatic, Lightway UDP, Lightway TCP, WireGuard and OpenVPN. For Android it lists Automatic and Lightway TCP
NordVPN	No help-center article mentions them	NordWhisper, which works “by making your VPN traffic resemble regular web traffic”. Its Obfuscated servers now run on NordWhisper
Surfshark	No help-center article mentions them	Its China page, updated October 2, 2026, recommends a manual WireGuard connection. Its OpenVPN connections use obfuscated servers

We found no announcement from any of them about adding V2Ray or VLESS.

V2Ray server for China

A V2Ray or Xray server for China runs outside the mainland, and in the research and reports we found, most blocked servers sat in popular VPS providers’ data centers. The November 2021, October 2022 and VLESS REALITY sections above have the details.

• Control panels. Some people manage Xray through web panels such as 3X-UI. In October 2024, Xray’s site said it now lists only panels “that can be configured safely”, and that “the issue of plaintext HTTP cannot be taken lightly”. In February 2025, RPRX wrote that panels offering plain HTTP by default let the firewall intercept passwords and proxy private keys.
• Host rules. Some hosts ban these tools. DigitalVirt’s terms ban “SSR/V2Ray/OpenVPN/PPTP/L2TP” and similar tools on its servers, calling them a danger to the network security of China’s three big carriers (our translation). Our CN2 GIA VPS comparison lists other hosts’ rules on proxies and VPN tunnels.
• Routes and latency. In our ping measurements from 29 cities on October 13, 2026, the Chinese carrier mattered as much as the distance. See ping to China for the results and our guide to CN2 GIA, China Telecom’s premium route.
• Setup. Use the official docs for V2Ray or Xray, and the REALITY project for REALITY.

Before you run a server for yourself or share one with others, read what the law says about VPNs in China.