But a government like China interferes with even VPNs (more so outside of the greater Shanghai and Beijing metro areas, in case anyone is sitting in those areas saying "My VPN works great"... they permit it and can block or interfere with it anytime they like) so I don't think they are really a solution. In China, nothing really works if the authorities don't want it to. VPNs are degraded to the point of being unusable, SOCKs proxy over SSH is the same, TOR is unusably slow, etc. Unfortunately, I don't think there really IS a solution in the face of determined governmental interference.
Yes, the Chinese government can interfere with or block VPNs whenever they want.
However, don't discount the impact of bandwidth/peering issues on VPN performance. In most cases, I've found that VPN throughput over TCP (either PPTP or OpenVPN) is similar to HTTP throughput to the same host.
You can test this yourself. Put a file on your VPN server, and try to retrieve it over HTTP. If you're worried that the latency is limiting the throughput, use wget to make several connections at the same time, and sum up the transfer speeds.
Finally, you're right - there is no (technical) solution in the face of determined governmental interference.
But a government like China interferes with even VPNs (more so outside of the greater Shanghai and Beijing metro areas, in case anyone is sitting in those areas saying "My VPN works great"... they permit it and can block or interfere with it anytime they like) so I don't think they are really a solution. In China, nothing really works if the authorities don't want it to. VPNs are degraded to the point of being unusable, SOCKs proxy over SSH is the same, TOR is unusably slow, etc. Unfortunately, I don't think there really IS a solution in the face of determined governmental interference.