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How long will China tolerate VPNs? While they are an essential tool for international business, they also completely defeat the firewall.

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The chinese government don't care about VPN that target people with credit cards that can pay in US dollars because most local chinese won't have access to that and those that do are also likely to travel abroad and be exposed to all that information anyway...

Not always. Different ISP's block different things and work/home connections also have different rules.

Once I came home to find they blocked the port to SSH & VPN. After 1 month of fighting with the IT management in the local building they opened it again.

Run your OpenSSH server on port 80 or 443.

Yep! The Great Firewall is only the outermost layer of blocking inside China. The ISP blocks plenty: only last week they suspended my account for a few days, probably as a "threat". It seems officials develop connections with the ISP's to collect surfing histories of customers these officials have an interest in. There's no concept of "providing an internet service to customers" in the minds of the ISP managers. If you use a Chinese ISP for any sort of web-hosting, be aware it may be vandalized by anyone willing to pay 100 rmb (i.e. 15 US dollars).

I think VPNs are there to stay. They do not defeat the purpose of the firewall.

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