[gruez]

There's a more straightforward way: roam with a foreign sim card. Roaming traffic is tunneled to your home telco and for whatever reason the tunnel isn't inspected at all. With the advent of esims you can buy a roaming sim and use it on your phone within minutes.

[Roark66]

Can you activate it while abroad though? After I moved away from the UK I still had to have a UK mobile phone for various things. My UK sim would stop working after about a year away. When buying a new one I had to get someone in UK to put it in their phone to let it at least once connect to the home network. Without it the card would be useless. Is using foreign sim cards now easier?

[kotaKat]

eSIMs just need a data connection back to the SM-DP server and that can be done over Wi-Fi. I don't think that protocol is blocked that they talk to it, and the SM-DP vendors on the market are typically "global" providers that work with multiple operators.

EDIT: I checked myself to be sure. It's "RAM over HTTP(s)" -- "Remote Application Management" of the eSIM. GFW doesn't block HTTPS, so you should be able to get provisioned to any carrier worldwide while inside the firewall.

https://www.sharetechnote.com/html/Handbook_LTE_eSIM.html

[gruez]

There are esims explicitly targeted to travelers. Those are the ones you want. In my experience they don't have any activation restrictions like the ones you describe