I think the real question here is will NEO let the government have some influence over them? Anything in competition to the countries vision can be taken down easily however it also means that if accepted will only ever succeed.
I saw and interview of Da Hong Fei. I understood that they have very good relations with government (of course it's not officially disclosed, but could be logically understood) as they actually created blockchain for governemnt (onchain). They started creating very good ecosysytem around neo and promoting NEO projects and they invest in those projects. It looks like they are trying to build whole blockchain ecosystem on Neo. And my intuition is that this will be created for China.
By the way legally ICOs are not banned in China, they are allowed but for certain investors.
Devcon is coming and Da Hong Fei and Ceo of Trinity both say there will be something special on Devcon in January.
Let's see what they prepared...