How to watch your Favorite Foreign TV shows in China?

After moving to China, you may miss your favorite foreign TV show series. Miss your Sunday evenings huddling up on the couch and watching the new episodes of your favorite foreign TV shows, you are watching for years. 

The local Chinese TV will be often limited to some Chinese shows or a few foreign shows harmonized into Mandarin. If you live in a big expat housing compound you will have some international TV channels. If you watch some Chinese shows you will likely start hankering a Chinese TV show after a while.

Don’t worry; there are some options you can use to watch foreign TV shows or some American TV shows in China. 

Watch the US or Other Foreign TV shows with a VPN

By using Netflix or Hulu or direct from the websites of TV channels you can watch some American TV shows online in China. Or with a subscription to Amazon Prime, you can follow your favorite foreign series at home. On Amazon, you can also get a free trial for some channels. It will help you to check out if this will work for you or not.

There is another easy way to watch your favorite series on Netflix. You will have to catch up with “Virtual Private Network” also known as VPN. Some streaming services are often limited to people in some country like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon restrict content based on location, it is called geo-restriction. 

Using a VPN is very simple. It is basically artifices these streaming services into the logic that you are watching the series from a different location other than your country. 

It is an easy and good option to watch your favorite foreign shows at home. Use a good VPN service like Express VPN that is very useful and I am using this for many years as a foreigner in China. You can subscribe to an annual package and watch your favorite series for a long time. 

Don’t forget that China has an extremely slow internet connection for foreign websites. If your video streaming is going slow, you can end for buffering or returns to audio-only. Don’t worry there are many other options. 

Buy the DVD

Another option is watching the TV show series on DVD. If you can wait for the season to end, you can buy a DVD with the whole season. There are many small stores in Beijing ex-pat areas with an amazing collection of TV series. It is the easiest and convenient way to watch your favorite foreign TV shows at home. Moreover, you don’t have to wait for the next episode. 

Watch foreign TV shows on Chinese Websites

I am sure you have ever noticed people watching American TV series on the subway. Just like that, you can watch many foreign TV shows on different Chinese websites or apps. Many Chinese websites are much faster than international websites and have a great collection of foreign and American TV series.  

From my outlook, PPTV and Sohu TV are the best website or apps for watching foreign TV shows in China. Youku is another popular website/app, but I don’t have used it. All these websites are fully in Chinese but easy to understand. While using these websites in Google Chrome, you can use translate the content with the Google translate function. It is a very useful feature for foreign people. But Google apps are often blocked in China, so you will need a VPN that can work well. 

I often use Chinese apps, which have access to Chinese websites. These Chinese apps have little pictures and descriptions for TV, movies, series, etc. There are many features in these apps. On Chinese apps, you can even search TV shows using the filter by country and by year. These apps have a search bar with the little magnifying glass icon; you can use it to search for some foreign TV shows. However, you may experience an error in searching some shows, while they are available. 

TV shows are usually available on the websites after the day they originally broadcast. The complete season remain available on the websites, so you can watch anytime. All Chinese shows have Chinese or English subtitles. The best thing is that you can watch without any commercial break. 

All websites or apps may not have the same TV series, so you may need to use more than one app. I personally recommend using Sohu TV because its search feature works well and keeps track of the episode you left off. 

Or just Enjoy Chinese TV shows

While living in China, you have to speak Mandarin on different occasions. Watching Chinese TV shows can be very helpful in learning Mandarin. It is fun and will improve your listening skill. Many Chinese websites have a great collection of Chinese TV shows. Some Chinese series have subtitles in Chinese characters, which can be very convenient in learning Mandarin. You may have to watch some Chinese TV shows to find the right show in which the actors speak clearly and slowly, and the subtitles are written big enough. While watching Chinese TV shows you will listen over and over again. The character written on the screen will help to understand the language.