I worked in Beijing at Microsoft Research in 2008 and at the time they had a fiber link to Japan that was completely uncensored and the fastest internet I had ever used at the time. Perhaps this is no longer allowed but it certainly used to exist.
We were buying exactly same "direct physical link" to HK. It came not to be such.
We connected a fibre tester, and nothing was coming out on hk side. We tried connecting to google.com, and to our surprise this "physical" link was also censored.
Then the cableman basically says, use this link, and VPN over it. The speed was quite good still.
