i am told by expats that you can use VPNs in china to get access to blocked sites; i am also told that the government generally turns a blind eye, especially to foreigners using VPNs. how they deal with chinese users, in terms of social credit score, is something that is opaque. it seems like an inherently "antisocial" activity by the standards of their governance.
this is all assuming that with nation state resources they can identify use of VPNs at the user level.
You can also use `H` for back and `o` for opening the URL prompt, among others. That requires you to be in the insert mode for typing in input boxes or interacting with the website you're on via keyboard shortcuts though.
I haven't used vimperator for a long time, but in petadactyl you can use C-o and C-i to go back and forth, respectively. The key bind matches pretty well to what it is in Vim too.
https://github.com/ogham/dog is pretty good in that regard