I’m in China, is it too late to download an efficient VPN?
By “efficient”, I assume you mean “works”. It’s not too late, but your efforts will be hampered by the great firewall for sure.
With your question, you’d better to find someone in china who fights against GFW for a long time.
In mainland, you don’t have any chance to use a service with OpenVPN protocol, but LT2P and SSTP. However, the connection of vpn service are pretty unstable, you need to find a way out other than using vpn.
1st, shadowsocks(影梭), this is a socks5 proxy service which split from ssh protocol and it is the most popular methods to across the wall. you can find either paid and trial service provider through google.
2nd, GoAgent, it is a proxy service based on GAE(Google App Engine), you can set up your own service free or use all-in-one browsers like ChromeGAE. since some security concern, I suggest this for only nonsensitive accessing.
3rd, Lantern(蓝灯)、Psiphon(赛风)、v2ray and other proxy services designed for getting out of GFW. They are very popular because they can run on an android phone pretty well, and free to use.
Most of tools(services) that I listed are open source, so you can find their code and website link on github. Some of them are support english, so just try them one by one to find your one.
for more info, check these articles(may need traslation):
https://wsgzao.github.io/post/fq/
btw, you need to download those tools from some 3rd party website if their official sites are blocked.
the great firewall
as a chinese, cannot agree more
Dumb question, could OP first download any VPN, then once he has that, use it to download a better VPN?