The 2nd half of the Scaling Bitcoin conference was China, where many photos were taken of the world's biggest miners sharing a stage. So I don't see how Chinese Bitcoiners have "little say in the matter" of scaling.
But as one of the Chinese panelists said at the event, they felt like merely an audience who are asked to sit there to choose between options given to them.
Please explain the perceived benefit of 2MB over 1MB blocks at this time. Why are they, right now, superior in a cost vs. benefit analysis?
The perceive benefit varies. For some, it is that Bitcoin will continue to function as a payment network for individual users rather than a settlement network where only large transactions can be processed cost-efficiently. It is a modest change. It introduces less complexity. It gives SigWit more time.
Also, some believe that it is a test of Core team's willingness to listen to them. If they don't make what appears to be a small compromise, the Chinese fear that they will unlikely to do so in the future.
Some believe that the Chinese community's interest being underrepresented at the level of core development is much due to the fact that as a whole they have been myopically focusing on making money and not paying enough attention to protocol maintenance. As a result, they have almost no say and are little more than merely audience.
The way you repply gives me a lot of confidence the miners acting in best longterm interest of Bitcoin, at least haobtc. Any way biggest miners + biggest Bitcoin services could form partnersip where their views about longterm future of Bitcoin should be actually considered as a Bitcoin roadmap and any individual or corporate core developer going against such roadmap would just risk losing development time because economic Bitcoin majority would likely not merge such work in their mantained repo? I mean with today situation giving ultimate power over Bitcoin to just few, although talented coders, is all I know about against how succesfull product is created and delivered - they just excell in coding, probably nothing more notably - seems more like recipe for longterm fail at least for miners + Bitcoin services.