I bought a Mikrotik a month or two ago, expressly so I could install OpenWRT on it, and use it to get around the Chinese firewall with Shadowsocks. The OpenWRT install never worked, so now I just have a (pretty nice) router, doing what routers are supposed to do. It's long since that OpenVPN didn't work in China, but this should provide a good learning experience, and who knows, maybe it will lead me to something that works.
OpenVPN uses its own non-TLS UDP protocol to carry traffic (with an optional TCP fallback), and only uses TLS for connection setup. ref: https://wiki.wireshark.org/OpenVPN