Yeah, but I think there might be some consensus among interested parties (especially in parts of greater China and beyond) that things are headed for worse before they will get better.

@JanJal: probably right, seems to be the trend lately, at least for Internet reliability using VPN.

Furthermore I would call this decrease in internet freedom and VPN reliability a symptom of that general (in my opinion) downward trend, rather than happening on it's own for its own reasons.

Internet is still a tool, and while it allows many things that wouldn't be possible without, it still mirrors real life and how that develops.

In some cases it may function as catalyst for reactions that would not appear otherwise, but for which the underlying momentum already exists.

And in that role, I argue that internet may be better way to let out steam than some more direct options that would be bound to come on table otherwise.

OK, but in its mirroring of real life it is partially, at least, a control system - and here I'm thinking about the greater and greater realities of surveillance&control that come along with the wonders of much electronic technology - and letting off steam can amount to little more than passivity.
But yeah, use it, it's a tool, can be used in different ways by different folks for different reasons, but let's not kid ourselves - it's no level playing field - mirrors real life and how somebody is developing it, and us (and not just in China, of course). Continuation of plenty in the past: ever-increasing 'efficiency'.

Anyway, VPNs, hm, yes, all obvious I suppose.

They are doing something extra to prevent you from connecting to VPN`s.

Confirms my suspicions.
What next?

Don`t know. On the bus I saw a commercial (it was a government commercial)and in it they had Youtube, facebook, google and had the round red circle with a line through (like the do not smoke signs) and it said something about starting in June 1st. Blah, blah, blah. I didn't quite understand what they were saying. Anyone else seen this on the bus advertisement screens?

For the technologically more affine readers around here, here's how I got around the firewall:

They are using machine learning to recognize VPNs by analyzing the size patterns of the TCP packages transmitted through the firewall. If the patterns resemble a handshake for a protocol like SSL inside an already SSL/TLS-encrypted connection, they can guess that the user is using a VPN.

My workaround: I simply configured my proxy to pad small packages with random data to make them seemingly random data packages, easily passing the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for randomness. Now the Chinese firewall is out of luck and I'm surfing the western internet with full speed (plus latency due to the physical distance, of course). If you don't wanna program it yourself, there are several free opensource obfuscation proxies available online. (Google: china obfuscation proxy). In addition, I'm going through standard SSL ports and tunnel through a nginx webserver on my server so that anyone connecting to my server will think that I'm running a standard webservice.

In case they get curious about why most of my traffic goes to a single foreign IP and start throttling, I'll go through a CDN but currently I'm too lazy to do that.

What also works is setting up a tunneling proxy through SSH as mentioned above, but it's much slower because they drop packages if they think something's fishy and my SSH tunnel doesn't support padding.

Gosh. That's Kurtology not Kurtosis. Respect.

@Liumingke1234: "outube, facebook, google and had the round red circle with a line through"

Any chance that it was not related to subject at hand, but the US ban for Huawei to preinstall those softwares in their new phones?