VPNs in their basic sense are legal in China, many large companies provide them/use them and so on. VPNs designed to bypass the Firewall without government approval are a subset of VPNs which the police do not like.
I would assume EasyTier devs use it to connect their devices within China so the great firewall isn't involved. Attempts to cross the firewall with EasyTier are detectable without things like Tor's pluggable censorship evasion transports.
>China relied on two U.S. companies--Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks--to help carry out its network upgrade, known as "CN2," in 2004. This upgrade significantly increased China’s ability to monitor Internet usage. Cisco also sold several thousand routers (IHT) used to censor web content, and "firm’s engineers have helped set it to spot ’subversive’ key-words in messages."
What's ironic about that? Cisco sold them networking equipment and the CCP used it to censor.
Yeah – the shadowsocks developer is Chinese and the government went after them for working on an iOS VPN app back in the day on GitHub. That was a while ago, before the CCP had direct control over the App Store with law.
