I really think I would have to leave China if not for Shadowsocks. It is my only reliable tunnel to the outside internet. I'd love to meet Clowwindy one day and hear about his experience.
I have been im China recently and it is still quite easy to access the unblocked internet. the lazy solution is to subscribe to one of the many VPN solutions available. I subscribed to ExpressVPN and could use it all the time with fullspeed on my phone and my girlfriends phone. They also have server close to China so the delay is human.
It wasn't so easy on my Chromebook. First I tried to tunnel my traffic through SSH to my german linode host but got blocked down to near zero bandwith.
After a little bit of searching I found shadowsocks and set it up on my chromebook and linode. It worked flawlessly. After that I downloaded the shadowsocks android app (via VPN) and used it from the on.
Interestingly shadowsocks plus a cheap node is actually cheaper than a VPN subscription. Just don't forget to use a node close to your location.
I thought plain Shadowsocks is not enough to get through the GFW so Shadowsocks R came to be supporting more obfuscation features. Am I wrong? It seems like the Shadowsocks R community is pretty much gone as about a month ago the identity of the main Dev leaked. Does someone know if development is still going on somewhere? The Shadowsocks (R) setup is mainly complicated as many resources are only available in Chinese.
I'm using plain Shadowsocks with no issue.
How is this any different from setting up a VPN? The user still needs technical knowledge to setup a server outside the GFW.