I spent years living in China. Do you really mean zero success?
OpenVPN stopped working in 2017. Deep packet inspection prevents the initial handshake. I hosted my own SS for a number of years before switching to wireguard, with more success… however, they IP ban a majority of VPS IP ranges, so the providers Linode/DigitalOcean were messed up.
And everyone experiences VPN slow down during CPC conferences.