How to send large files to China for free (and what actually gets through)

Your usual tools are blocked, and they fail quietly

The big Western cloud services are the ones people reach for first and they are the ones most likely to fail. Fast.io's round-up of file sharing in China lists Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box and WeTransfer as blocked, along with Gmail and Slack. That is a vendor's own page, so read it with the appropriate pinch of salt, but it matches what anyone who has tried to work with a mainland team will tell you.

The blocking is not always absolute either, which is almost worse. Some services are throttled rather than dead, so a 500MB download crawls at a speed nobody is going to sit through on your behalf.

Test before you plan around it. Not with a checker site, with your actual recipient. Send them one small file through whatever route you intend to use and ask them to tell you whether it opened. Two minutes of asking beats three days of assuming.

Know what "large" means before you pick a route

Most email providers cap attachments somewhere around 20MB to 25MB, and the smaller of the sender's and the recipient's limit wins. If your file fits under that and their email is reachable, just use email.

Between 25MB and roughly a gigabyte, you are into link-sharing territory and the free options below do the job.

Above a few gigabytes, cross-border and free start to pull apart. That is video footage or raw camera files. You can still do it, but you are choosing between paying for a service built for it or accepting a transfer that might take all night and fail at 90%.

Let the person on the other end choose the pipe

This is the whole trick and almost nobody does it. You do not need to work out which service can cross the Great Firewall. Your recipient already knows, because they do this every day.

Send them a message like this before you send anything else:

Quick one before I send this over. I've got a 400MB video file and a 12MB PDF for you. What's easiest on your side: WeChat, Baidu, a link, or something your IT team prefers? Happy to use whatever works for you.

It takes ten seconds and it moves the problem to the person best placed to solve it. Every time I've skipped this step and picked the tool myself, I've spent longer fixing it than asking would have taken.

A VPN is their problem, not your solution

Somebody always suggests this. Your contact can use a VPN to reach Google Drive, so just send the Drive link.

Leave that decision to them. Unauthorised VPN services are not licensed in mainland China and individuals have been penalised for using them, so this is firmer than the "grey area" it often gets called. Enforcement against ordinary users is inconsistent rather than absent, which is not the same as safe. For companies it is clearer still, and plenty of corporate IT policies forbid it outright. Your contact is the only person who can judge their own exposure, and they should check the current position locally rather than take a British founder's word for it. Asking a supplier or a client to route around their own country's internet controls so they can read your proposal is a strange thing to make them do. If they offer, fine. Do not make it the plan.

Where free runs out

Once you are moving tens of gigabytes on a deadline, the honest answer is to pay someone. Filemail, FileCloud and Binfer all market themselves on getting large files in and out of China, and Fast.io's guide notes Filemail handling files up to 250GB. I have not stress-tested any of them across the border, so treat that as a starting point for your own trial rather than a recommendation.

The other paid route, if this is a recurring relationship rather than a one-off send, is a Chinese cloud provider. Alibaba Cloud and Tencent both have infrastructure inside the mainland, which fixes the reachability problem on your recipient's side. It does not delete the border. You are still uploading from outside China, which the providers themselves classify as a cross-border transfer, and the data rules that come with that still apply to you. It is a heavier setup, it needs a look at your own compliance position first, and it only makes sense if you are doing this weekly.

Getting the file there is only half the job

Everything above solves delivery. It does nothing about whether the person on the other end understands what you sent them.

A 40-page PDF crossing a language barrier and a firewall is not a strong bet on its own. When I was doing go-to-market work before LiveDocument, I'd send a document and then spend a week reverse-engineering someone's silence. That gap is why I ended up building LiveDocument: you attach a recorded video walkthrough to a PDF or an image, share it as one link, and see which pages someone actually spent time on. For a document that has to explain itself with no meeting attached, your voice walking through it beats another paragraph of text.

It is not a large file transfer tool, though, and it will not move 5GB of video for you. It is also hosted outside mainland China, so it faces the same reachability question as everything else here: test one link with your contact before you rely on it.

For everything else, my more general notes on secure free file sharing and sending zip files cover the non-China version of this problem, and the mechanic underneath most of it is simply sharing a PDF as a link instead of an attachment.

Frequently asked questions