China's new internet regulations clearly state that legitimate VPN connections will be allowed also in future.

That means VPN connections that the bigger companies (like banks that tigertiger mentioned, and other multinationals) have from their China offices to their headquarters abroad over leased lines or other private setups.

The argument from Chinese side seems to be that VPN crackdown does not affect such legitimate enterprise level connections, and therefore the effect on businesses will be limited to so small entities that they don't need to care - it will not collapse the economy.

But of course it will hurt startups and individuals who cannot afford such heavy solutions.

To solve that, personally I suspect that they will eventually create a VPN business of their own (another SOE), with VPN client that allows access to more foreign websites but also gives them tools to monitor what each user does on the connection.

@nnoble

No I haven't tried to take ham myself. The only meat products I have taken back to EU (succesfully but probably against regulations) have been those small candy-like bags of meat and spicy chicken feet in consumer packages from Carrefour etc.

exhausted: ""Do you know how long they will take to process the vert at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs"

Processing times, fees, and other official information seems to be here:

cs.mfa.gov.cn/wgrlh/lsrz/lsrzjjs/

On the topic of English translation, you may have have to do the whole notarization and two-level legalization separately for the translation - so the final users of the document can trust that the translation was done by a proper entity.

That starts with finding a certified translator, which the local notary office will recognize, and then to Beijing...

Process of notarization and legalization of documents to be used in another country is almost always the same in every country (save cases when the two countries recognize simplified apostille process - China is not signed to that).

A locally notarized (that's the first step) document is double-legalized (two more steps) first in Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the country where the document originates from, and then in the consulate of the country where it is intended to be used in.

In your case:

First you notarize the original document in the locale where it is originally produced, I guess in Kunming. I remember the office that can do that is in Baoshan Lu close to Nanping Jie. Here they stamp it to verify that it was really granted by the real police department.

Then you get it legalized in China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing. There they stamp a certificate that the previous step (notarization) was done by approved authority.

Finally you take it to US Consulate in China (probably Beijing, since they are in same area with China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs), where they make a second legalization stamp indicating that the stamp from China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs is genuine.

Now you have a chain of trust that makes the document usable in USA.

A shortcut (or pitfall) which may be possible, is that after the local notarization you could go to China's Foreign Affairs Office in Kunming, and they could mail the document to Beijing to be handled.

They provide (or did provide anyway) service that gets the stamps in Beijing done at both Mininstry of Foreign Affairs, and a chosen foreign consulate, and then sent it back to Kunming where you could pick it up.

However as pitfalls go, we tried this a few years ago, and the document got lost on the way. The Chinese claim it was delivered to my home country's consulate, and my consulate claims that if it was, the delivery person would have been given a receipt, which was nowhere to be found. In the end I had to fly there myself to do it.