It doesn't matter if the china exchanges are against it or some other entitiy. it's all about nodes. if the people follow the fork, chinese exchanges have to follow.
It has very little to do with nodes, you can setup thousands of nodes overnight, but the largest power in bitcoin ecosystem is miner, the second are exchanges. It is miners' hashing power decide where the blockchain goes. If you suddenly lose 50% of hashing power, there are much more danger on the way ahead: First, your transaction would not be able to process in time for at least 2016 blocks. Second, your chain's hash power would be the same as the other chain, so the hashing power on the other chain could easily 50% attack you and double spend/reverse transactions on your chain, causing your chain to be useless for serious business transactions
And exchanges are more important now than 2 years ago. Without exchanges, most of the people would never be able to get some bitcoin to do transactions, because mining are now concentrated on large mining operations