Upon initial interaction with AWS China, one might not immediately recognize that it’s actually a lot like a wolf dressed up as a sheep. You will quickly notice that you can’t peer your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) in AWS rest-of-world with one in AWS China. You may also observe that you can’t reference your AWS account ID in a AWS China Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy.

This is deliberate. AWS China provides only a selection from the complete list of AWS rest-of-world services. Some of the services that are available only have a subset of features, namely Virtual Private Network (VPN) under VPC.