Even though China does have approx 60% of the hashing power, I doubt if Jihan / PBOC could cajol them all into supporting a China-only altcoin, but maybe that has been their plan all along. Whatever... let them do it. The remaining 40% hashpower is still signif and a lot of mining hardware that has been mining shitcoins of late will flow back to BTC. Very quickly we'll be more decentralized. Why would they give up so much control? ViaBTC may mine BCC as an PBOC experiment or whatever it is, but the majority of Chinese hashpower very likely to mine the main Core chain.

IMO if Bitcoin consensus isn't robust enough to deal with a defection then we'll have to do some tweaking. The technology of eliminating the double-spend problem has been made and we're not going back.