besides using VPN (we were using anchorshield back then but now it's blocked) I was using gladder. A firefox plugin which allows you to use a proxy only in a tab. Great plugin. Helped me a lot.

Tor[1].

[1] http://www.torproject.org/overview.html.en

Tor and almost any website mentioning or hosting it is blocked, on top of that my experience with Tor is that it is no longer usable.

First users were forced to use a relay, then relay IP's started getting banned, and now I think that the government has found some method to prevent connections to the Tor network completely (I'm not sure how).

Slowly but surely the screws are being tightened, more and more of the western net is becoming unavailable. I guess already 30-35% of all sites linked to on HN are blocked.

The relays still work, the mechanisms to share the relay addresses have changed a bit and continue to do so. Tor's traffic looks like regular https traffic so it's very difficult to block. The tor project makes China one of it's priorities and continually play an escalation war with China's government.

So if it does get blocked its not for long.

I wish I could help you with more specific information off the top of my head, but I fortunately don't have to use relays. I am willing to do some research and share the results here if you like.

When I was over there we often used a simple proxy server, like pimpmyip or zend2. Occasionally we were not able to access these and had to look around for something else.

The TorProject website itself is down in China

Nice try, you Commie bastard.

This is the Commie bastard's site:

http://www.startbreakingfree.com/

A real hot bed.

Oops I forgot HN doesn't like jokes haha