Litecoin hashrate dropped ~20%, which I think explains the drop in the SegWit signaling:
https://bitcoinwisdom.com/litecoin/difficultyThey were able to move the price up by 200+% and the hashrate is up less then 30%.
So they are building a base of miners are profitable at the higher price thus encouraging signaling SegWit. Presumably that 20% hashrate will be turned back on when necessary to push the activation over 75%.
It is quite probable the Chinamen are simply manipulating the market and delaying SegWit on Litecoin in order to maximize their ability to profit on price manipulation. They can also use these resources gained from manipulation to buy more hashrate to signal for SegWit.
It is too much obfuscated to figure out. Bottom line is Bitcoin won't get scaling. Litecoin is poised to get scaling.
I usually check here
https://www.litecoinpool.org/pools for each pool's hash rate and percentage. You are right, in the past few days total network hash rate went down quite a bit, but there's also something else that is interesting: antpool used to have a maximum 4% of the hash rate (somewhere below 100 GH/s), and now they've pushed to 8.8% (around 230 GH/s). Your theory is that they (Jihan and co) will not try to block segwit on LTC but their actions speak the opposite, at least until now. My take is that they are playing with fire and might get burned sooner than they expect.
I also considered your proposition that some of the chinese miners are purposely delaying signalling segwit in order to accumulate at lowest prices possible and thus maximize their profit in the forth coming pump. Actually, I don't see why they wouldn't do this.