Take a look at the tools Chinese people use to evade the national firewall. They're extremely sophisticated, and need to advance all the time because the GFW constantly becomes more sophisticated. There are a lot of encryption technologies that the government also allows to work until they block them at a critical moment. All of the VPNs you've ever heard of in some advertisement on YouTube or whatever are easily and totally blocked in China.
Governments can make evading their censorship very difficult, painful, and risky, if they want to. It can have a huge impact.
> All of the VPNs you've ever heard of in some advertisement on YouTube or whatever are easily and totally blocked in China.
Have you actually been to China? I was there not long ago traveling around a range of cities and never had trouble with either Mullvad or Astrill having used both hotel and residential networks. I have many friends who have similar experiences. In fact, I've never recalled anyone having trouble getting outside of the great firewall.
You can buy a Hong Kong esim in China that has access to everyrhing. You can use any vpn service and it just works. The only place I had trouble was the airport wifi but shadow proxy works fine. So I don't know what you're talking about
Governments can make evading their censorship very difficult, painful, and risky, if they want to. It can have a huge impact.