Why do you say that? Does express vpn no longer work in China?
I did it last week to test… and subscribed like 3 days ago
I chose “Bank Card” and used my Visa debit card, it worked for me.
Express VPN hasn’t worked in China for 2+ years. But they’ll happily take your money, telling you that it does work, and then refuse to refund when you arrive and discover it’s useless.
It does now apparently 
Mate I was there last month and half of us used express
If it didn’t work in the past it does now
I used ExpressVPN in china in july 2023. It worked a few times about one hour a day in morning and towards the end of the trip it never worked.
However, I found out that if I just used my phone’s data plan on roaming, I did not need vpn at all to use google and US social media. Probably because China Mobile do not implement the firewall on foreign phones.