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.