Technically yes, but it’s pretty difficult to score a VPN for CN mainland. Even if you do, your VPN provider is very unlikely to route all your traffic via VPN.

More often than not, Chinese VPNs operate a whitelist for certain traffic to “expedite” or unlock Chinese social media and streaming apps for expats. Renting servers these days in China require identity authentication, and if it’s found out that you use them as VPN servers … well let’s just say you’d better give up your China travel plans!

There doesn’t seem to be drastic drifts on Apple Maps outside CN, all the roads and attractions line up, just very few details and no public transport. Satellite imagery also lines up pretty well with main roads.

Long story short, foreign enterprises aren’t allowed to do any type of surveying or mapping for China at all (that explains Tesla FSD’s unavailability in China). Google, like Apple, bought Amap’s database when they were still around, but they stopped doing so some time in 2015 following their eventual blocking the previous year, and the GPS drifting persisted when they terminated maps.google.cn a few years ago.

Given the region’s immense infrastructure growth I’d say Google Maps have completely lost its relevance at around 2017 to 2018, and COVID only made the internet of China more detached. Use Apple Maps while in the country instead, it has updated information, adequate translation, great transit and driving directions including in-door plans for malls, detailed points of interest info, and visibility of international locations (though HK, MO and TW used Amap databases instead of data from Apple’s default TomTom), in line of what your experience would be in the US or Europe.