Howdy all.
I run a business in Australia and hope to be moving to Kunming shortly. I need access via RDP to a virtual server in Australia, and wanted to see if anyone had experience using the RDP protocol from China to access services in other countries. Any insight into this would be awesome - preferably without a VPN required.

I have accessed computers outside China with RDP client, but last time was maybe 2 years ago. It worked as backup option to check email etc when other options were unavailable, but that's it.

RDP et al protocols and ports generally work - however during major government meetings usually centered around the five year plans and their annual update meetings - china's internet is frequently throttled, to include amazingly even pounding the usually reliable VPNs.

Across different provinces and locations - it's hit or miss - for example China Telecom might be wide open, but Unicom and China Mobile networks might be unable to connect.

So, your best solution is still to have a reliable VPN as a backup solution, should your various mail security protocols be spontaneously blocked.