It's not hard, but it's not easy and certainly not reliable. This is a good video on the topic, not exactly about your question but they do cover it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lM_vvmTB_4

Last time I was there it wasn't too hard. But it depends on if the Chinese government is blocking your VPN or not. I usually connected to Seoul or Hong Kong.

Are people there worried about being prosecuted (maybe severely) if they're caught bypassing the censorship?

At the time no. But things have really changed. That said, my family lived through the Mao era and the Cultural Revolution, etc. Terrible things can happen but the rule of thumb for China, in my opinion, is that China (and probably any other authoritarian country) does not tolerate another nexus of power. Reading censor material is not so bad. Disseminating it will get you in trouble. Trying to speak out against the government and disseminate that opinion will get you disappeared. For example, Catholicism was banned in China for a long time until the Pope made a deal that gave the government a voice in the appointment of bishops. What made Catholicism problematic is that there is another authority figure in Rome. Buddhism, in the form commonly practiced in China, has no such figure which is why it was tolerated and sometimes even promoted (with a very nationalist slant). Tibetan Buddhism, on the other hand, has an authority figure not controlled by China. You get the idea...

It seems like it is a simple concept that you are getting at. Authoritarians want te prevent other seats of power. It makes me wonder about what the growing Chinese middle class wants.

EDIT: But back to the question. I think the answers make sense. It's easy to bypass if you are savvy (as we know already) but if you challenge govt they would take offense. I guess the grey area would be anonomous critique, but I digress; thanks for the response.

So your point about anonymous critique is somewhat true. It's actually a little more sophisticated than that. Critiques often come in the form of historical parallels. For example, rather than critiquing Xi for having a bunch of "yes" men, some high up official in the party lauded the achievements of Tang Taizong -- the second emperor of the Tang dynasty. He's generally considered an exemplary ruler but the other trait known about him is that he was open minded and sought out people who disagreed with him. China became very cosmopolitan under him and the silk road connected China to far away places (it's the inspiration for Xi's Belt and Road Initiative)

So in praising Tang Taizong, the official was critiquing Xi's inability to deal with differing opinions.

This isn't a new thing, BTW. Chinese scholar-officials have been doing this for ages. China has historically been a very authoritarian country and the same ideas applied then (kind of). This is one reason why historical Chinese officials were (ironically enough) criticized by the Communists for being backwards looking. Straight forward critique wasn't allowed during the imperial eras so they always had to find historical parallels to vail their critiques and advices.

Interesting! And quite ingenious to hide critique in praise.

No. Reading censored foreign media doesn't get you in trouble, and it's extremely widespread. Posting anti-government opinions is what gets you in trouble.

It is less about bypassing the censorship, more about what are you trying to do bypassing the censorship. I don't think you will have any problem reading stuff. Transferring information may cause you big trouble. As individual, I do not think you should worry about it at all.

It's not ok to take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar, so please don't do this here again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If my comment's against the guidelines, feel free to delete it.

One of the things you will see is that a VPN will work for a while.

Then it will stop.

Even though they may not be able to break the crypto, it's not hard from a DPI (deep packet inspection) and netflow analysis perspective to see that an IP in China has a high volume of encrypted traffic to/from a single /32 in the US/Europe, and then blackhole that.

The GFW has automated null routing/traffic blackholing functions in place for this.

Are there currently any (CLI) tools that route traffic through multiple IPs (I mean not tOR)?

For example, multiple SSH tunnels through something like sshuttle where you try to give the impression that you are not threading all your traffic through one "hole".

Not aware of any measure like that but shadowsocks is the one obfuscation method that has been able to bypass the GFW in China for a long time now.

Always impressed that it still manages to work.

It's not too hard but in the meantime it's not trivial, either. I worked for a multinational corporation in Beijing so in the office (or outside the office via corp vpn) we were allowed to access sites such as google.com.

I paid for a vpn service so for personal stuff I was able to access every single site on the Internet. I did this for over two years and never got into any trouble. My impression was that nobody cares if you find a way to browse facebook, twitter, wikipedia as long as you don't use that opportunity to incite subversion of the government or some similar shit.

In my school (top 20 university in China), it's common for students to use vpn. And I think plenty of programmers in China can set up their own vpn servers. Also there are many YouTube videos forwarded to video sites in China.

Only a few people with good enough English can/are willing to read serious articles.