But, of course, the problem is that even with an open wifi there are quite a few websites that are blocked by the great firewall...

So using an open wifi doesn't solve the problem the way tor does. The other way is to have a server outside of china and use ssh to proxy through it but how many have a server they can access like that...

Anyone that cares can access the Internet at large in China. There's many http proxies that work quite fine. Most expats that care use a VPN tunnel to a service or corporate HQ. The rare person uses Tor but it's generally disfavored because it's unreliable and slow.

This is not the problem however. The vast majority of Chinese people in general don't really care about censorship. Far more due to language and culture than censorship the Internet is mostly an internal Chinese thing to Chinese for the purposes of entertainment, not information. Many view state censorship as doing its job to protect the majority from corrupt western influences.

But it seems most people in the west would like to prefer to imagine jackbooted thugs keeping the masses down through coercion and fear. The truth is rather worse, that of apathy, ignorance and a collectivist submission to authority.