
chiha:
i didn't think the Chinese government even allowed vpns, they block a lot of foreign media there and do monitoring and stuff.
Yes they used to sporadically block vpn's, but it was always temporary, and never all providers at the same time. It didn't seem like a serious attempt at blocking it all, more like an annoyance to make vpn's seem unreliable. It's not that they couldn't block more, it's that they didn't. Idk it's been a long time since I've lived there though, and I hear it's gotten easier.
But afaik they've never allowed vpn servers to run inside China, they've only allowed people within China to connect to vpn servers outside of China.

chiha:
I'll lose my mind if we have something like here in India
The YouTube algorithm has recommended some BL from India from time to time. For example here. Nothing with actual budget though, and no GL yet. But Thailand also took a good number of years before BL got budget, and then another good couple before the BL genre spawned the GL genre... so it might take a while but there's not zero hope? There's a start? Maybe it'll be faster because now they have Thailand to point to as proof that it can work?