The Great Firewall doesn't restrict SSH, so you can functionally ignore it (assuming using e.g. `ssh -D` is second-nature to you).

Last time I tried it (which was quite a while ago, but I'd be surprised if they became less restrictive) ssh was fine for interactive use, but they did some sort of traffic analysis to kill connections that got used for tunneling other traffic like that.

When I was there last year, it took some doing to get a VPN working. Mullvad was pretty good but it would take a few tries to find an endpoint I could connect to. The simplest escape hatch is to have a cellular connection from another country, but that's either expensive or slow.