https://cointelegraph.com/news/china-will-heavily-crack-down-on-all-bitcoin-trades
How many times is China going try this same trick? How many times are stupid people going to care and fall for the same story?
No matter what China has started to take bitcoin regulation very seriously compared to before where there were absolutely no regulations, so it would come as no surprise to me if this turned out to be true.
However, even if they decide to crack down on BTC trading they wouldn't have the means to simply monitor every p2p transaction that everyone does. There is no way for them to "ban" bitcoin. All they can do is ban centralized bitcoin exchanges, they cannot ban p2p exchanges at all.
It's not wise to fall for FUD like this.