What is the simplest way to access the Chinese internet from the U.S.?

There are Chinese companies that are selling you VPN service into China "officially sanctioned" by the government. But free? No. Best bet then would be open proxies, for which there are dozens of sites that list them. But don't expect any sort of performance or reliability then.

There is obviously no free VPN or proxy server. When tagged as Free, it's either monetized with incessant Adverts or even worst - with user's personal information. Around all, the solutions offered by these provides are always awfully awry.

For the VPN recommendation, I suggest you give NordVPN a try. It's the best so far and it's also cheap.

Glad to hear, when purchasing NordVPN subscription via the promo link underneath, you get yourself up to 68% of discount plus an extra 3 months added. Kinda worth the shot

Here's the promo link

go.nordvpn.net/SH4rP

Best of luck

there are plenty of free vpn services on iOS for accessing content in China at least, they have paid tiers, but generally the free tier is good enough. I imagine if you want to access video content, the free tier bandwidth may not be enough.

.cn serves the same content, but there are region-locked media content, songs, videos do not play in other region due to copyright

Most of the Chinese websites aren't geo-locked, you don't need VPN or proxy for this.

I was able to find the company on my regular internet connection. The secret was to use the Baidu search engine.

is it typical for .cn sites to serve different content depending upon whether or not one is VPN'ed to within the GFW?