I would be extremely cautious about connecting to these interim hosts that provide access to the rest of the Tor network.<p>If I were a government bent on surveillance, the first thing I would do after blacklisting legitimate hosts would be to publicize my own malicious connection points. Here, little bee, have some honey.
Hmm... I've used Tor in the past when working from China. This could sort of suck. It was dog slow but sometimes the only way to gain access.<p>FYI I used it to access sites that were blocked by the great firewall for no conceivable reason (like pbworks.com and my own personal dev server).
I surprised that Chinese hackers don't try to find some way to DDOS their own government. It'll probably be like a proletariat revolt. You can only mess with people's internet so long before they'll start striking back.<p>I think its interesting how TOR is trying to work on realtime bridge connections with IP address distributed through Twitter. Yet another great realtime application for Twitter.
Sometimes I wonder if at some point there are diminishing returns in the prospect of censorship. Even if the chinese government puts vast amounts of resources behind censoring the 10-15 thousand users of the Tor network, they have a much larger population to worry about and those users are often technically competent enough to circumvent the attempts at censorship by the chinese government.