Hangzhou can be pretty if you’re around the lake but it’s kind of dusty and smoggy away from it.
Working in a hostel on a VPN is fine, you can run to starbucks if the internet isn’t good enough but you will have the occasional bad day where you just can’t work. I also recommend the ATour chain of hotels, they’re a mid-range business chain and have excellent internet, office chairs with a sort of desk or table and in-house complimentary laundry. They’re not dirt cheap but are easily affordable if you’re earning a western salary.
Chinese internet can be hit and miss and VPNs get attacked constantly and blocked occasionally, they’re not 100% reliable which is a problem for working. You need to keep trying different ISPs and different VPNs and sometimes you just won’t succeed. This is especially true during party conferences or if federal officials are visiting your city or any other high profile event that could draw a crowd. Reality TV shows filming locally have gotten the same treatment sometimes.
You also can’t ignore Chinese politics because it doesn’t ignore you. Other than the above issues with internet, you might find yourself having trouble because a journalist in your home country published an article about CCP corruption or someone said something about the South China Sea or Taiwan. If you got into trouble for a minor offence at such times, it could be blown way out of proportion to punish your home government. Visas might suddenly not be renewed, it happens.
You only have rights in China until you don’t, then you’re fucked. This happens to a small number of people every year but for them, it’s life destroying.
There are long tourist visas for some countries (USA and Canada only maybe) but everyone else is stuck at 3 months and it’s a pain to get. Even the North Americans only have a 90 day stay. There’s no legal way to get longer visas for others and the illegal ones have mostly been cracked down over the last few years.
Usually if they can reliably tell its a VPN, they’ll perform deep packet inspection which massively increases latency, or they’ll throttle your internet connection entirely and you’ll be at some tiny bandwidth until half an hour after you turn the VPN off.
Most VPNs attempt to disguise themselves as random 443 traffic these days and use custom or encrypted hand-shaking to prevent that being recognised.
Stuff like OpenVPN doesn’t have a hope in China because it can be identified and then attacked/throttled.