30% is high, but maybe not enough to make a big difference in such a police state.

The point missed by the comment whom you reply to is that tech that enables information sharing (Internet, VPN, comms satellites) comes together with tech that allows for more effective population control and propaganda (great firewall, surveillance satellites, social karma, "everything app", electronic money). It's back to the human factor again: if you don't have protections against dictatorship tech won't help you, but if you do have democracy you don't care about that fancy tech.

That's only on paper. During anniversaries of various politically important events, access to the foreign segment of the Internet is slowed down, infected with packet loss, and disrupted in other ways so that VPNs become practically unusable. This obviously affects not only VPNs, but other kinds of traffic.

Source: I worked for a company that had an office in China, and was responsible for maintaining the Chinese servers. In that case, I had to troubleshoot multi-hour MySQL replication lags. Solved by switching the TCP implementation to BBR, because it is resistant to packet loss.