You'd have to transmit it before the client can double-spend, yes, but my point is that it's not necessary for the owner of the coins to have an internet connection.

Time-locked transactions can kind of help here.

You can receive incoming blocks on the Bitcoin network via satellite, radio etc. I doubt a government would be able to keep up the whack-a-mole game against many activists who can set up mobile block relays.

You can also send transactions over any communication, even SMS. A good example from Andreas Antonopoulos is that emoticons are a 128 character set, so you could send a 250 byte bitcoin transaction as a sequence of 15 emoticons.

Good luck stopping that.