Actually, there are many ways to circumvent the Chinese censorship that work very well: Chinese (those who are interested in circumventing censorship, and they are few and far between) often use things like Garden Networks and related software, developed by overseas Chinese. Tor is also popular - strange thing is that its website isn't blocked, and one can download it freely. Foreigners in China mainly use simple webproxies like anonymouse.org, which don't have any encryption, but are enough to access the blocked sites (however, not enough to get access to sites that contain forbidden words - but since these are Chinese words, most foreigners don't even know how to look for them).
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Actually, there are many ways to circumvent the Chinese censorship that work very well: Chinese (those who are interested in circumventing censorship, and they are few and far between) often use things like Garden Networks and related software, developed by overseas Chinese. Tor is also popular - strange thing is that its website isn't blocked, and one can download it freely. Foreigners in China mainly use simple webproxies like anonymouse.org, which don't have any encryption, but are enough to access the blocked sites (however, not enough to get access to sites that contain forbidden words - but since these are Chinese words, most foreigners don't even know how to look for them).