I lived in China for 9 years and my VPNs were always broken, to the point that I only used Facebook at work (since we had our own line). Most of my foreigner friends were in similar boats, being programmers none of us were technology illiterate.

You can find pirated American TV shows and movies on china’s internal internet. No need for a VPN. Quite the opposite really, it’s much harder to find those things outside of China.