The Chinese have their own online ecosystem that is mostly separate from the rest of the world. Google, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook aren't very popular in China and the Chinese people seem to prefer their own homegrown alternatives like Baidu instead of Google or Weibo instead of Twitter, etc. So how did Bitcoin buck this trend to become popular in China? I'm guessing it must be very popular there because China seems to be very important for Bitcoin. After all, why else would prices drop whenever news come out about their government regulating Bitcoin?
For China, BTC played a comparatively large role since it has been used in order to get past their restrictions of the monetary system. So, any regulation attempts there could be expected to create some movement.