It's a private network/route with traffic containing nothing but corporate data. Most multinationals facing this situation route out through HK, with a secondary failover usually in Taiwan or Singapore. Works a treat, but is costly and latency can be subpar.
It also doesn't solve the problem of mobile access to Google Apps for Chinese workers (Google Play Store & apps are not bundled by many (any?) Chinese OEM handset makers or carriers. You can root & sideload, or you can purchase phones outside the country and ship them to your employees, but even if you do this, there is still no guarantee they'll be able to access Google's apps while on cellular networks.
Google Apps will drain your battery when they can't access Google's servers. Roaming with a China Unicom Hong Kong sim card, like the cross border king, will give you gfw free access.
Google Apps will also drain your battery if you are in a region where Google has no network-location data yet, because then Google will turn on your GPS, and send to their servers the pair of GPS-coords and strength of networks.
If you live in a suburb in Germany where almost no networks are known to Google, this means if you enable location services your GPS will try to get a fix 24/7, eating your battery in about 2 hours.
This is probably going to be an issue in China, too, considering that Google doesn’t have location data there.
I think you can turn this off. My phone has a setting called 'Scanning always available', which says "Let Google's location service and other apps scan for networks, even when Wi-Fi is off.". If I turn off this setting, and turn off wi-fi, then the problem you point out should be avoided, right?
But if you turn on WiFi and Location at the same time (which is not uncommon), then it will suck your battery dry in seconds. Turn any of those two off, and it works.
Don't suppose you could explain to us network plebs how that would bypass the Great Firewall?