I've got mixed feelings about this. I'll agree that the volume on Chinese exchanges was absurd and that price started trending up hard after they were shut down. But that could be coincidental.
More than possible but China did have some weird hold over traders from elsewhere.
When it costs you nothing to trade then that's quite radically opposed to how the rest of the market works and the behaviour will be different accordingly.
Throw in the stupidity of thinking a market is more authoritative because of its fake volume then you have a recipe for a deadlock that needed to be broken, and was.
It looks like China is not even relevant in Bitcoin anymore. I remember when they used to literally manipulate the market with all the PBOC press releases, it was clear in the graph when they released a new statement. I don't see this as clear anymore.
Last time I saw China tumbling down the price was with the ICO ban+exchange shutdown combo:
![](https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2Fimages%2Fuser3303%2Fimageroot%2F2017%2F10%2F03%2F20171008_btc1.jpg&t=665&c=EL0M7wdwPIW_aw)
And still it recovered a while after.