I guess they are setting an example for their citizen. I am not sure whether this is a psychological warfare against the bitcoin supporter in China and give fear to them. But this kind of strategy is really effective especially to those who do not want to be compromised of whatever stuff and go against their country. This might be the first step of neutralizing bitcoin supporter in China. Or probably there are criminal cases charged on these people and China needs to stop them from leaving their country. I hope they do not ban them in living in their country
It is about control of their people. If the Chinese people have money that is outside of Communist Party control, the government of China loses control.
Isn't Bitcoin just about that?
What you wrote does not simply apply to China but to every country/government. Bitcoin is a decentralized protocol. As I've been saying over and over again we are not going MySpace or Napster here. We control cryptographic keys and not Bitcoin. Good luck to them to find about mine. Or theirs, it does not matter.
When the mining is spread across many machines, no one machine is telling others what to do.
Agreed, that was why China is finally waking up to the fact that it will undermine their power. I won't be surprised to see mining banned too. (Although it might suit their goals better to maintain a huge mining presence in order to destabilize bitcoin as much as possible with various proposals for forks etc).