Bypassing Government Censorship of the Web

There have been a number of recent news items about how China (and other countries) are placing restrictions on the use of the Internet within their countries. China blocks YouTube and other sites and blocks searches on particular subjects (such as "Tiannanmen Square" or "Tibet").

So, I'm wondering, might there be a way that we software geeks could come up with something that would allow users to bypass those restrictions, so that the government, in their control of ISPs, would not be able to tell what sites are being visited or what searches are being performed? I'm thinking of perhaps a special application which would encrypt the outgoing and incoming packets and to set up web sites that would serve as a intermediaries between the users and their intended target sites. When a user wants to view YouTube he'd actually communicate with an intermediary site that would gather the page data, encrypt it, and send it along to the user. When a user wants to Google on some forbidden search term he would actually communicate with the intermediary which would do the search for him and, again, encrypt and transmit the results back to him. Additionally, perhaps a form of a peer-to-peer network could be set up "on top of" the Internet, to provide a way to bypass the government controls.

It just seems to me that there must be some technological means by which we could keep the Internet free of such government censorship and control.