When I was living in Beijing some month ago the bad Internet really upset me. Almost every international connection was quite slow. A lot of pages took minutes to load because so many sites use Google hosted fonts, js libraries or API. These requests took about a minute to timeout and finally the browser could start to render the page (e.g using a default font). Most vpns are like described often slow, so also no solution. I then wrote a chrome plugin to filter all requests to Google hosted libraries and rerouted them to a Chinese service which mirrors Google hosted libraries. This really improved my surfing experience.