How do you use youtube in china? Asking for a muggle friend in a foreign exchange program. I sent a link to proxysite.com but the lack of response makes me wonder if that was a bad idea without further precaution. I've never configured a VPN before and Tor is a very bad idea here.

connecting to a vpn server in japan is one of the few options. But watching youtube will still be hard because china throttles all outgoing connections. And i've read some news articles that in the future using a vpn will be a crime.

so learn about vpn connections

I've used two VPN services (never from China though). I would recommend TorGuard with a static IP.

The software they have works great plus I'm using it on a Cisco router with Tomato and it works for streaming HD content from the UK to France (I'm getting around 19MB down). Support is also pretty fast.

Good luck!

Heard China is cracking down on VPN right now and blocking many services.
So the common go to ones might not work.
I'd recommend finding some forum for China expats, maybe somewhere on reddit, they should be up to date.

Ended up using an old laptop as a teamviewer server.