I haven't come across a foreigner here that had an issue with an employer VPN not working, China doesn't care too much about what the foreigners in China are looking at, they try to block access to what their own people can see.

Foreign SIM cards can bypass the firewall either by just using cellular data or via VPN/wifi.

For the mainstream VPN's - avoid ExpressVPN it stopped working sometime last year. Astril works ok for my needs.