I live part of the year in a country that regularly filters the internet. I've had no issue so far using VPNs, but I prefer to tunnel directly through the PCs I have running 24/7 in my US office. Would tunneling work in China or does the Great Firewall prevent that too? I'm curious because there may come a day when I need better workarounds myself.

It’s pretty sophisticated at detecting tunnels, but presumably still possible to evade. This post was on HN recently:

http://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewal...

If you're talking about SSH tunneling then, no, it wouldn't work. My experience is that SSH tunnels get throttled (all the way down to zero) pretty soon after you send significant bandwidth through them.

most of my browsing are done with tunneling and it got filtered 3-4 times in the pass year. No biggie, I just redeploy another vps with a new IP from snapshot and the problem usually goes away.

Shadowsocks definitely works too.