I presume that the Chinese customs inspectors don't steal the ASICs and start mining with them, so that might be your explanation of why the hashrate isn't rising before the first customers have received their product.

I know that a new computer product coming into China gets inspected for CCC compliance, but I wonder to what degree they care about a new exported product. It is a sort of crypto brute forcing hardware though, so if any technology arouses suspicion on export, it would be this.