Didi is absolutely dominant in Kunming. Overnight (and I've been there 15 years) it became impossible to hail a cab, because all the cabs were servicing Didi customers. Way to market your service ... if you aint on it, you aint getting to where you need to be! I would say market penetration on a per-ride basis was pushing 80%, and that was a year ago. Uber has no hope.
uber would have no hope in the first place being a foreign, non-chinese company that relies on internet access to hosts not wholly controlled and hosted in china
Using Uber here in Suzhou, I'm pretty sure their China servers are completely within China. There is no "bump" from transversing the GFW and starting such a service in China without having the servers inside would be crazy. There is no reason they couldn't just completely partition their service.
Not sure about you but I've personally started and run a foreign, non-chinese company that relies on internet access to hosts not wholly controlled and hosted in china without insurmountable problem.
