Yeah WhatsApp, Facebook, Reddit, Google Hangouts all banned in China. Pretty much anything not owned by a Chinese company, or anything that didn't go through all sorts of hoops to meet Chinese censorship criteria (and even then it's not a guarantee), is banned. Even github was banned until Chinese developers complained that it made their jobs impossible
No, VPNs are slow and unreliable. Many expats go without. After paying yearly fees for a couple of VPNs that stopped working a couple of weeks after the fees were paid, I gave up also.
You learn to live inside the Chinese internet. Video sharing sites in China have ripped most everything off of YouTube anyways, and there is less enforcement of copyrights.
