All those numbers are very misleading. China has shit load of college grads because 90% of the universities are just diploma mills that you put in 4 years and you get your degree, there is almost no way to fail out. Most of those graduates cant even find jobs because they know nothing when they graduate.

The chinese stock market is a joke, there is little regulation, insider trading and pump and dump schemes are rampant.

All those apps have lots of user but many of them are bots. Companies will use bots to self promote and repost their shit. I have a weibo and have maybe 4 or 5 posts over the last year and have around a 1,000 follower almost all are bots who just repost everything i have posted. They are used to boost other people follower count to make them seem more popular and gain more legit followers, people call them zombies, they will follow random people just to make themselves seem more legit and not get deleted by the system.

The biggest hurdle in china is regulation. The Didi app got shutdown last year because they were allowing people to add tips to their request for taxi, i.e. you would say i need to go to x location i will give you 5 dollars extra if you are here in 5 minutes. This was declared illegal as taxi prices are set by the government and tipping the driver is considered an illegal bribe. They had to remove this feature before they were allowed to continue operation but it took weeks of them negotiating with the government before they could go back online. Apps like Momo are filled with hookers soliciting guys and other illicit activity.

Google play is actually not banned in china. It is just not the default app store for android phones and many providers have disabled the ability to install the play store on their phones. But if you have a compatible phone it works just fine. There may be so money being paid by other apps stores like baidu to make sure the google play store is hard to use in china.

This article is look at things with rose colored glasses. Things are not that great for startups in china. In fact if you dont have a large bank roll or good government connection chances are your chinese startup will be shutdown by some form of government intervention since the internet is so heavily regulated almost everything you do on the internet required special permission from the government