I just spent 3 months in China this summer. The GFW has become much more sophisticated than I remember. I found only one method that reliably worked. That was to use Holafly (an international eSIM provider) and use its built-in VPN. China largely doesn’t care if foreigners get around the GFW, I guess.

Another method that usually worked was ProtonVPN with protocol set to Wireguard. Not sure why this worked, it’s definitely a lot more detectable than other methods I tried. But as long as I rotated which US server I used every few days, this worked fine.

No luck with shadowsocks, ProtonVPN “stealth” mode, Outline+Digital Ocean, or even Jump / Remote Desktop. Jump worked the longest at several hours before it became unbearably slow, I’m still not sure if I was actually throttled or my home computer started misbehaving.

I didn’t get around to setting up a pure TLS proxy, or proxying traffic through a domain that serves “legitimate” traffic, so no idea if that still works.