All network admins operate in the political domain. Several people here have mentioned that SSH forwarding works in China as I'm sure it does in Iran and Pakistan. Standard SSH on port 22 may just be too useful a tool socially and economically to block. As a consultant I find it rare to visit a shop that blocks SSH anymore even though most of the security admins that I know are well aware that with Putty you can forward any port inside to any port outside as you wish. Of the admins that I meet, most shrug this off as a non-problem saying:I know that users can circumvent any block on my firewall using SSH and port forwarding but the vast majority of my users don't have the arcane knowledge to do that.
We might not be the right people to ask since anyone on Slashdot could find Putty and the right configurations to do this in 15 minutes of searching on Google. And that assumes that the person asking is stuck on MS Windows. In Linux or OS X it's built into the OS.
I'd disagree that SSH is the best way to do this. A VPN is better because using a VPN allows you to hide in a class of users that the attacker wants to court and curry the favor of. The Chinese government wants our business so they must consent to our business people using strong encryption on our communications back home. SSH forwarding is one way to do this but a VPN is a much more common part of corporate IT security policy. If SSH is socio/economically difficult to block, a VPN is even more so.