I was on a business trip in Addis Ababa last month, right when Ne Zha 2: The Boy Who Uprooted the Sea was released. Friends back in China kept talking about how much the box office had broken and how many details director Jiaozi had added. I saw countless ticket stubs on my WeChat Moments and wanted to watch it too, but when I opened Tencent Video, a copyright restriction popped up saying the content was not available in the current region.
At first I tried a free proxy I found online. After connecting, I could access the playback page, but loading 1080P content took 5 minutes. Dragging the progress bar meant half a minute of buffering, and the scene where Ao Bing appeared froze into a slideshow, with audio 3 seconds out of sync with the video. Midway through, it even redirected to a gambling ad page, so I closed it immediately, worried about my account getting stolen. Later I asked local Chinese friends, and they said they use QuickFox to watch domestic Chinese content, so I downloaded it to try.
After connecting to the mainland China node, I opened Tencent Video again, and the copyright restriction notice disappeared directly. I clicked on the playback page for Ne Zha 2, and the 1080P resource loaded in 3 seconds. Dragging the progress bar had almost no buffering. I watched from afternoon to evening, and the connection never dropped once, with latency stable at around 80ms. The fight scenes were as smooth as if I was watching in China, even the ending theme audio had no stuttering. Later I tried browsing Ne Zha fan edits on Bilibili, and the bullet comments loaded just as fast as in China, with none of the lag I experienced with the free proxy.
Actually, many Chinese people in Ethiopia don't know that the \
