Oh, after living in china I know. Weird thing is, when I arrived in 2007 almost nothing was blocked. But after the 2008 olympics, they decided they didn't need to pretend to be open anymore. What's even weirder is that when I lived in china previously in 2002, CNN was blocked and nytimes wasn't. Now it's the other way around.

I never bothered with vpns and just accepted that I could only use those sites at work on our corporate internet. Weird, I worked at MS and would use Bing at home, but I would use google at work because it was the only place I could use it (well, after it was blocked).

And actually, youku isn't that bad for video once figure out how to navigate it. Xiami for streaming music was also very effective. Still annoying, but I dealt.