I doubt it's this - I would say it's more likely that connections from within China are able to get to fewer connections outside of China. It's not just the government firewall, peering is just not straightforward when it comes to this country.
In that case, then the mining operations of ASICminer need to be moved outside China. Long term, transaction fees are going to be a susbtanial portion of ASICminer's mining income. In order to ensure a steady stream of mining income, they need to make sure that they are getting all of the transactions fees that are available.
As it is now, if you look at blocks found immediately after ASICminer finds a block, you will see a larger number of transactions and thus a larger amount of transaction fees in that block. ASICminer is giving away those transaction fees to the next miner to find a block. It may not seem like ASICminer is giving up much now, but if the value of bitcoin increases substantially, then these missed transaction fees are going to add up.
That's also bad for the AM reputation. Us, we mostly care about missing fees for shareholders, but I can imagine many of the unrational anti-AM people out there would be happy to point this out as a subsequent problem of AM hashrate. Usually I don't care about their screaming, but on this I'd feel uncomfortable.