fwiw work has a subsidiary in china, which also has a (i assume permitted) VPN back to the mothership and it's so godawful slow and unreliable it makes the south american VPNs look like fiber internet in comparison. you're literally going to have trouble keeping a TCP connection open for longer than 10 minutes and throughput is reasonably measured in kilobit/s. major chinese city.

i imagine the chinese intranet is reasonably quick and the interconnection to the internet is just intentionally ultra-bottlenecked.