As long as China still holds majority of the hashrate of the network, we cannot really exclude them from the trading scene since they will still hold bulk of the trading volume all around the world. Also, at the current state of affairs, even rumours in China are generating a wave of reaction in the market, needless to say bitcoin is still China-bound even if regulations hit the users hard.
China's hashrate and mining ventures are indeed a very important part of why they have as much influence as they do. As long as most mining hardware is designed and manufactured in China, its influence will be non-negligible.
Nonetheless I'd argue that apart from that China never was that much more influential than other governments to begin with. Similar statements from other governments would have had comparable effects. Just imagine if the SEC wouldn't have fired a warning shot but would have went straight to prosecuting ICO token issuers. Or if the EU would threaten to disconnect Bitcoin exchanges from the traditional banking system. The effect would be no less than what we see with China.
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I think China will be left in the dust because regulations will be the death knell to their Chinese cryptoventures like Neo, and they soon will be surpassed by the world crypto markets (which I hope is the case).
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Regardless of what China does, in my opinion Neo's claim to allow smart contract programming using a variety of programming languages is a pipe dream. The state of smart contract programming is questionable as is, throwing another hard problem into the mix (ie. supporting multiple programming languages equally well) makes me even more skeptical about this project.