Maybe. Or maybe they are just doing it because it suits their economic interests to keep blocks small, as TPTB said. I consider that quite plausible, I'm surprised you don't.
We are being raped by the Chinese because we are too stupid to design and adopt a better block chain consensus design:
The Chinese are siphoning off our speculator money with their $50 per BTC mining costs:
Anyone know what proportion of BTC is produced in China/held in China/sold out of China ?
Without this info I don't know that I can put too much store in this theory Jorge.
There is practically no reliable info on the bitcoin economy, in particular on the flow and ownership of bitcoin by country. (This is a serious problem for would-be investors.)
We can only note that more than 67% of all new bitcoins are mined by Chinese pools, which probably comprise mostly Chinese miners; and that bitcoin has practically no use inside China, except as an instrument of speculative trading inside the exchanges. Until last October, variations of trading volume at those exchanges did not seem to be reflected in the USD transaction volume, which may mean that there was little deposit and withdrawal at those exchanges.
There is efficient arbitrage between the Chinese and non-Chinese exchanges. If Chinese miners sold their coins only in Chinese exchanges, that would tend to depress the price there. Then the arbitragers would immediately move those excess coins to non-Chinese exchanges, until the prices got equalized.
So, I would guess that it does not matter where the Chinese miners sell: the net effect is that a large fraction (if not most) of the bitcoins mined in China are eventually bought and hoarded by non-Chinese investors.
@TPTB you can't really have it both ways. Either the miners hold the upper hand or the developers do. I think it is a former, and given that you don't need overwhelming consensus, there is no 'design by consensus'.
Now if Bitcoin actually worked in a more fully decentralized manner then miners would not hold the upper and and then you might get something closer to design by consensus.
EDIT: What satoshi was shooting for by his own words was neither changes at the whim of a mining cabal nor by an overwhelming consensus of developers, it was "set in stone". It wasn't even close to achieved.
Yes we must redesign the block chain protocol so that the miners are the payers and so they don't have any centralized control.
On the likelihood of fixing Bitcoin:
The problem is that the cost [ of validating a transaction ] grows like N^2 for N inputs.
By the way, there is no excuse for the cost to be quadratic. That is one of the many crocks in the BitcoinCore implementation, that will take more crocks to work around. Like the Segregated Witnesses proposal, malleability and its partial patches, blockchain voting to increase the limit, etc..
There you have another possible failure mode for Bitcoin:
runaway code crockification (RCC). As the code gets more complicated and ugly, fewer competent people will be willing to work on it. Their place will be taken by incompetent pople, who will add even more crocks -- and so on until the code will fail and there will be no one capable of fixing it in time.
Just a possibility; but after seeing the malleability problems, the Fork of July fiasco, the "fee merket" plans and the RBF hack, the Seg Wit proposal -- I fear that the RCC may be already underway...