I asked what the difference between a Firewall and a paywall is "from a user's point of view". At various times and in different ways it's possible to bypass the Firewall depending on how much you want to pay, e.g. using VPN's, using proxies though there's less of them around nowadays, visiting Hong Kong, getting friends overseas to scrape and email content, and the Firewall seems to fail periodically, not just from the Google change last weekend but often for a minute here, an hour there, for different websites.
Official and unofficial are two ends of a long sliding scale. Many paywalled newsites allow unlimited access if the article is accessed through links from search engines. This is an "unofficial" option. Accessing American TV shows from within China is more "unofficial".
Firewalls are set up by those who claim ownership over the people using the net; paywalls are set up by those who claim ownership over the information being accessed. Not only do both those concepts of ownership sound suspect to me, but also from the user's POV the experience of a Firewall and a paywall on the official-unofficial spectrum is the same.
Edit: By "paying" I meant paying with money (e.g. VPN's), with time (e.g. a day in HK), with guanxi (e.g. friends scaping and emailing sites), etc.
5 stories a month.
Intention of the firewall is to block all your access to the content.
Intention of the paywall is to encourage you to pay for the access to the content.
The difference is also in the legal framework, especially for the people in China in case of the Great Firewall.
If you pay and pass the paywall, you have not done anything wrong in the eyes of the Chinese law (assuming that the content was not blocked by the Great Firewall).
Passing the Great Firewall might get you into the hot water.