My experience was that 2012 was the year they really broke the internet with some forms of rate limiting and other attacks against VPN protocol streams. I found over the last few months the fastest/simplest way to get reliable arbitrary HTTP(S) links from within the country on IPv4 was to use SSH with port forwarding to a squid proxy, ie: ssh -N -L localport:tertiaryhost:tertiaryport user@server ... then configure your browser to use 127.0.0.1:localport as a proxy. The old OpenVPN-based methodology was far too unstable. Tor has been effectively cut, unless you do the email-hoop-jumping secret and possibly short-lived endpoint request process and then put up with absolutely pitiful performance.
I suspect IPv6 solves most of the current issues; unfortunately my shot at getting it to work for this purpose didn't succeed, perhaps due to crappy NAT devices.
Anyway, I got sick of China's hassle (and economic bubble pricing vs. reducing quality of life, re: pollution of all kinds, visa hassles, etc.) for the moment, so moved to Thailand. Internet is so much better here.
Ya, last year was when they really started to crack down on VPNs. Life is quite harder, however, failure to adhere to IP rights makes local video streaming sites very useful compared to YouTube, so its not all bad (well, its not fair to the IP-right holders either).
Beijing is going through some tough times right now; the pollution is driving people out and preventing people from coming. This is probably a bigger problem than internet censorship.
You should definitely register on vk.com after you get off china if it's important to you.
On the plus side, sounds like you can probably swing a fat company-internal IPv6 pipe.
> As someone who has spent a decade or so in China, I believe that practically speaking the most obvious measure of control ... is bandwidth limitation.
This was true before 2009, but the situation became much worse after the Olympics when they actually blocked many of the sites we care about. VPNs are being attacked these days by the GFW as well, or anything that runs over https (reading hackernews is becoming harder).