I noticed that I was having more issues with private DC proxies (probably dirty) from multiple subnets than with any of the several IPs on a very popular VPN.
So my theory is that due to the massive amount of legit users in China that are almost exclusively using IG through a VPN and sharing relatively small pools of IPs. Highly popular VPN IPs are likely to be more trustworthy than DC proxies.
Out of the ~1.4b people in China incl. expats, pretty much anyone who wants to use IG has to use a VPN.
Seeing many DC proxies/subnets are exclusively used by bots, there is a next to zero chance that people using those IPs are innocent. It’s not the case with VPN IPs from popular providers.
IG can’t just action block these IPs to death unless they’re cool with cutting off ~20% of the world’s population from their service who have no choice but to use a VPN.
It would probably be worthwhile doing some tests like botting through a popular VPN and faking your footprints / user agents to appear to be from China.
I.e. Set language to zh-CN, if browser botting set browser user agent to UC Browser (most popular in China), set phone model/os’s to match what is common in China like Huawei, Oppo, Xiaomi, Vivo etc.