Or it could be part of general trend of splitting off internet and creating a firewalled chinese internet. PRC is explicitly favoring this outcome for decades now with explicit incentives via legal, financial and social routes.
They already did that ages ago. Any web tech company that wants access to Chinese market needs to play ball with PRC (just like what Apple and Microsoft does). Average Chinese person really doesn't care about global web, and the ones that really do, figure a way out through VPNs. I'm not Chinese, so I might be totally wrong, but that is my perception of talking to expats or people who still in the country.
Organizations dealt with certain "weirdnesses" (the great Firewall) for a long time. But my sense is that over the past few years there's been an increasing sense of pulling back from all this.
