Tor can be quite useful although incredibly slow.
tor.eff.org/

If you have firefox however you can download an extension called Foxyproxy (not sure of the link) which lets you create rules for which pages are opened using Tor so that you dont have to slow down your whole system. Eg, in firefox you can have one tab displaying gokunming without using a proxy and another tab displaying BBC news through the tor proxy.

There are better alternatives but you have to pay for them. For the last month I've been trying out www.strongvpn.com/ - Its a little pricey but works a lot better and faster than any of the free proxies - it puts all of your internet communication (web browsers, email clients, msn, skype etc) through a virtual private network somewhere in the USA.

DHL are here too, I've used them once. The guy who comes to collect seemed pretty helpful and knowledgable and even spoke a few words of English. I managed to send a package to London within 4 working days.

www.cn.dhl.com/publish/cn/en.high.html

EMS are ok but would only use them for within mainland China and Hong Kong. Once they leave the greater china area they have to use companies like DHL for the next stage anyway so may as well go with an international courier from the start.

i just checked out that greatwall broadband site and the top speed is 2M. I'm curious. Have you noticed if its really 2M or if like China Telecom it just says its 2M when its actually less than 512Kb? I think the 2M refers to the speed when checking sites within the Great Firewall.
I'd be really grateful if you could run one or two of the speedtests at www.dslreports.com/stest and let me know the result.

i think it must be localised to wenlinjie, plenty of water round the corner on jianshe Lu.