Grew up in China (moved to Australia since early 2008) where GFW is in place and getting overwhelmingly powerful, I've been through multiple stages to cross the `great wall`, SSH Dynamic Forwarding, PPTP, OpenVPN and now IPsec (strongSwan). The GFW has evolved so much (capable of massive scale MITM attack, DNS spoofing, traffic sniffing etc. you'll be amazed how capable the GFW is - of course courtesy of the team behind it) that it makes increasingly more difficult for people to access the real Internet.
I've ditched PPTP (not safe any more) and shifted to IPsec (IKEv2 + RSA with X509, IKEv1 + PSK + XAUTH) as it is being used by a lot of MNCs - can't killall. The GFW has developed technique to detect OpenVPN well and it is easily blocked so I don't use it at all. Over the past few years many home brewed protocols emerge - e.g. shadowsocks and variants and many others (I've never used any of them).
The best thing to do with VPN is that to understand the basics of the VPN solution of choice, try to install and configure from scratch on VPS and use that as your main protection (encapsulation) while using public Wi-Fi or untrusted network. There's been many good discussions on how to do this on HN.
NOTE: I am maintaining around 10 strongSwan powered IPsec VPN and 2 OpenVPN to help family members and close friends to access the real Internet (have to keep a low-profile though). Funny though, my networking skills evolved with GFW.
I've ditched PPTP (not safe any more) and shifted to IPsec (IKEv2 + RSA with X509, IKEv1 + PSK + XAUTH) as it is being used by a lot of MNCs - can't killall. The GFW has developed technique to detect OpenVPN well and it is easily blocked so I don't use it at all. Over the past few years many home brewed protocols emerge - e.g. shadowsocks and variants and many others (I've never used any of them).
The best thing to do with VPN is that to understand the basics of the VPN solution of choice, try to install and configure from scratch on VPS and use that as your main protection (encapsulation) while using public Wi-Fi or untrusted network. There's been many good discussions on how to do this on HN.
NOTE: I am maintaining around 10 strongSwan powered IPsec VPN and 2 OpenVPN to help family members and close friends to access the real Internet (have to keep a low-profile though). Funny though, my networking skills evolved with GFW.