They've got a crazy firewall blocking out sites. I'm not a teach wizard though so I'm unsure if Tor or certain VPN's can find a way around this.
People here will make up crap & guess but only Chinese bitcoin users would really know.
i hve some friends from china who personally doing gambling in bitcoin currency. they says that alot of people are doing it here in the same way.
Yes there are ways around it, however it is pretty advanced to be so big. It goes way beyond a simple DNS blocking like they do in Venezuela. Even Tor had problems bypassing it sometimes.
It's also cool that you know people from China, not that easy to communicate with them. I personally didn't meet anyone from there so far in the time i have using internet, at least not that i knew about it and that they spoke english.