[jongjong]

I was told that SOCKS proxies (which let you tunnel over SSH) are popular in China. It's super easy to setup and you don't need to install anything. You just need to SSH into any Linux EC2 instance outside of your network with ssh -D $port_number $username@$hostname and change a simple setting in your browser to proxy through that node using SOCKS5. It's nice because you still control the remote host (no need to trust some third party VPN) and the traffic is encrypted between your remote host and your local host (where it counts)... Anyone snooping would just think that you're SSHing into your EC2 instance for work purposes and not realize you're using it to browse the net.

[netheril96]

You were told wrong. If you uses SSH as a proxy, the connection will be slowed down to a crawl very soon. GFW distinguishes this from SSH command typing by looking at the traffic. This has been in place for at least a decade.