breaking chinese firewall

i have a few friends in China who are intrigued by the free internet we have access to, mostly youtube. i'm doing some research trying to figure out how to break the firewall for them. I am computer savvy to something like an SSH tunnel seems practical. Do these things work? how quickly until the government catches on? and how dangerous is it for my 2 friends who are being held captive by their government as slaves and just want to check out Youtube and Wikipedia?

 

I dont know much about their internet over there but is soething like hidemyass.com available to them?

 

not really, no. there are some pay services but it's expensive, i am recommending Tor network to them for now