Experience has taught that if a person sometimes accesses China internet persons / sites from outside the country, and certainly from within, your device (computer or phone) will be infected with very sophisticated monitoring software. This is standard practice in mainland China.

It is standard practice for external academic / research / corporate entities to issue specific devices when traveling in China, in order to control what is accessible and to clean them when the traveler returns.

Successful data obtainment continues to be critical to execute China's growth plans.

 

I wouldn't trust dealing with sellers directly in china unless you have some good references for them, however check out aliexpress. I've ordered a few things for my defender from there, a dashcam and side steps (the OEM look ones). Experiences with both were very positive, and the quality of the side steps, both items really was great.

Buying things from aliexpress does feel pretty dodgy, and you have to check the listing over pretty carefully as there are multiple sellers that list the exact same item with slight differences and shipping costs. The dashcam purchase made me realize that aliexpress has a pretty genius way to dealing with crappy/unreliable sellers. Aliexpress doesn't actually give the seller the money (or at least not all of it) until you receive the item and are happy with it. This results in sellers being extremely motivated to help you out with any issues you have as long as you open an issue before the grace period ends. I realized this as the seller for my dashcam was bugging me every other day to close the "claim" I opened about the cable not working properly (they included the wrong cable). They sent pictures of the box with the replacement cable, and a tracking number so I would close it before actually receiving the replacement cable. The good dashcam experience made me feel confident enough to order the side steps from aliexpress, they are literally identical to the OEM land rover ones except they don't have the small "DEFENDER" lettering printed in the rubber, they were around $400 including shipping, less than half the price of the OEM ones and the quality feels on par with OEM ones too. Be ready for crappy / non existent instructions, and a really terrible auto translation feature in the aliexpress app for support, but you can trust that the items will arrive and be as described. In the end that is what matters, and the rest of the headache is worth the price savings imho.