Discourse itself, as a general technology, doesn’t appear to be on any permanent blocklists. In my experience, the key to not getting a given site blocked by the GFoC is to not piss off the Chinese Government. That means:
- Don’t have any talk about Falun Gong, criticism of the regime, or similarly politically controversial topics on your site.
- Don’t compete with anything run by a Chinese company.
Mirroring of content to anywhere else outside of China is unlikely to last long, as they’ll find it again and block it. Mirroring it inside China will just result in it getting taken down, possibly with adverse consequences for whoever inside China is responsible for it.
Your best bet is probably to make the site available as a Tor hidden service, and essentially piggy-back off Tor’s continuous efforts to evade the GFoC. Another option might be to develop a domain-fronting-capable app (probably based on our mobile native apps) and host it on GCE, but that’s an awful lot of work.
How sure are you that your site, specifically, has been blocked? What are the chances that the whole netblock you’re in has gotten into trouble? If it’s a straight-up connection timeout block, it could be a whole-block block, rather than a content block. Packet captures from someone inside China could be informative as to what exactly is going on, but simply moving your site to a different provider might solve all your problems quite easily.