That having said, is that really an issue in China? Wherever you go you get hacked?
When I went to China, I made sure to put all the "suspicious" stuff (like a complete Wikipedia dump) on a hidden and encrypted partition of my portable drive and worried that it might be discovered anyway. In the end nobody even looked at it, the English Wikipedia isn't blocked at all, and the Great Firewall is trivial to circumvent with the right VPN subscription.
We tried this for a few months. We would subscribe to a VPN that worked, we paid our yearly fee, and it stopped working the next month. We did this a few times before finally giving up, it is far from trivial, the GFW is real.
Sadly, I learned about this only a month into my stay in Shenzhen; before, I was playing the BPN cat&mouse game.
China seems to have a weird dual stance about GFW. I even heard rumors that companies could pay someone to get a legal, unfiltered link.
Not true. The Chinese government is cracking down on VPN providers and you can go to jail for 5 years and have to pay very high fees for running a VPN service.
And the Great Firewall is becoming more clever, they are probably using some learning algorithms as often you buy a VPN subscription which works great but it usually gets shut down in couple of weeks or months at the most.
In order to circumvent the firewall you will need to keep switching VPNs a lot and even then it's quite flaky.
To clarity this, only VPN providers within China mainland is subject to this. VPN users are safe, for now.
Plenty of tech companies use a companywide VPN for a variety of reasons.