In China I found that using a UDP based OpenVPN to Slicehost was higher performing than the TCP on top of TCP issues that you get with SSH Tunneling when there'

In China I found that using a UDP based OpenVPN to Slicehost was higher performing than the TCP on top of TCP issues that you get with SSH Tunneling when there's packet loss. There's even some pretty decent desktop clients for OpenVPN, see Viscosity for OSX. This is assuming you have the ports open (the Great Firewall of China does HTTP inspection but not port blocking).