It wasn't a sham. The western world media has never been good a reporting the news from outside their own country, they always make it sound a lot worse than it really is. It's likely because they don't and most of use North American's understand the cultural differences between us and other countries outside our land mass.
Things are fine in China. It's true the government wants to keep a division of some sort between the bitcoin and banking markets, simply because pour fiat money into any digital currency causes problems for them and you would have to fully understand what happens to fiat moneys when you put them into your bank where they go and how they are used by the bank and the local government. Bitcoin takes that away from them, which is a good but bad thing too, bad for them. So the banks won't go down without a fight!
