@CarliO I've done some quick research and didn't find anything that would indicate that IP addresses from China are blocked from accessing Qualtrics surveys. Is there a peer in China that could test it for you? Other than that basic advice, it might be worthwhile contacting Qualtrics Support line to see if they have any information on whether the surveys have had difficulty in being received. It may also depend on the IP address you send from.

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Hi @CarliO , We run a survey that includes students from china. They are able to take the survey. That includes logging in with single sign on. Some staff went to china and I had them test just to make sure it worked. There did not seem to be any issues. That said, the policy on access in China can be a moving target, but given that Qualtrics does not provide content, it is unlikely that it would be blocked.

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> @CarliO said:

> I will soon be sending my survey to China and realized it could be that participants would have a harder time opening my survey.

> Thanks for your help



We’ve done lots of surveys into China (always professionally translated into Chinese) over the past decade.



Here are some issues we’ve encountered (with Qualtrics as well as other platforms), but YMMV.



Survey invitation deliverability: 10 years ago, we never had a problem and would typically get a very strong response from China. Then a few years ago, it felt like someone threw a switch and turned on the “great firewall of China,” resulting in one of three issues (i) emails wouldn’t get through, (ii) survey respondents would click the link, and the survey load times increased dramatically (they just saw a spinning wheel for ages), (iii) something (a bot) opened every single email sent to China, scanned each one, clicked all the links (take the survey, edit your profile, terms and conditions etc), but never actually initiated a survey session. In an attempt to combat this, we switched CDNs so the server would be closer, asked local colleagues to test the survey, and kept trying. In some cases, after nothing worked for weeks/months, we would suddenly get lots of (qualified) responses (as if the survey mailers suddenly started getting through). Other times we weren’t so lucky.



Latency: one issue you will (probably) run into when doing surveys in China (and often other geographies, including Europe) is network latency, resulting in a lower-quality experience for the respondent... i.e. it can be _really_ slow.



We’re in the US, and (according the URLs) all our surveys come from availability zone 1 AKA az1 (we’ve never been able to determine how many AZs there actually are, and/or where they are). When we send surveys to respondents in far-flung parts of the world, there is often substantial delay (having said that, some of our surveys are long and complex, so we’ve worked with Q-Support to adopt best-practice to mitigate this… but that’s a whole other story).



We haven’t yet fully cracked how to overcome all the issues of sending surveys into China. However, based on our experience, if your survey is relatively straightforward (i.e. it does not contain a lot of custom question types, JavaScript on all questions, complex survey flow, API calls, bringing in embedded data from Target Audience, etc.), you shouldn’t have too much problem with latency, assuming your emails get through.



However, if you are doing anything other than out-of-the-box functionality, you might run into some of the problems we’ve experienced, so you should program your survey accordingly.

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