Others on HN have indicated that sufficiently well-connected foreign organizations get their VPNs treated nicely. I think if you are encountering these problems you're just not big enough or haven't paid the right bribes.
It's not about being well-connected. As a company you can actually apply for a state-sanctioned VPN service that would be given the green light and won't be throttled even in the worst of times. If this wasn't the case, how do you think all international companies work in China?
Even when you have control over both endpoints, months of uninterrupted service will be punctuated with weeks of playing hide and seek with the Firewall. BTDT.
The problem is when you have a global endpoint that Chinese customers want to access. What do you do then? You either have to figure out how close you can get your services to China and hope and pray they don't whack your traffic one day, or take the bigger risk of deploying your endpoint in China. Either is fraught, but if you want to service that population...