> it's basically not possible to run any kind of outbound VPN connection (even to private servers) from inside of China anymore

This is not true anymore, and your own link says so:

> all circumvention strategies adopted by these tools are reportedly still effective in China

And while this paper is not the most up to date, there are actually many new kinds of obfuscating VPN/proxy/tunnel technologies out now, and they are currently not blocked. Some methods can even disguise themselves as unencrypted, plaintext legitimate-looking HTML and still tunnel traffic (slowly) through it.