Back on topic, do they actually print copies of the translated version in China? It would be mighty ironic if that is the case.
A Chinese website lists no fewer than 13 translations published in the PRC between 1985 and 2012, and it’s easy to find at least three or four downloadable or online translations on a quick internet search.
They are indeed printed in China, and are openly sold in China, without any government censorship surprisingly.
Censorship applied to materials about censorship seems like it's made for the Streisand effect—look at the vibrant samizdat culture in the soviet union. A much better way is to have it fall into insignificance out of lack of cultural application. You can bet they measure up well to a government that exercises prosecution of thought crime.
And let's not forget the number of times it has been challenged in US schools for communism (even though it is anti-communist) and for sexual content. http://www.deletecensorship.org/downloads/booklist_hpb.pdf
Also missing from the 20th century canon in an decently-sized bookstore were Catch 22 and The Catcher in the Rye but that might be more a regional taste/popularity/vulgarity thing.
My Chinese tutor in 1985 was a grad student from Beijing University. He once quoted Animal Farm to me. I was surprised he had read it. He told me that the Party made it available on a "need to know basis", in English only, to students in English programs at top universities.
Things have opened up a lot since then. Animal Farm is available, in Chinese, in urban bookstores. But some things that opened up for a while closed again only to reopen later. It's not as if it's just foreign propaganda that the Chinese exercise firm state control over media.
These days, an old book with allegorical criticism of general socialist/communist concepts won't usually be considered enough of a threat to ban, but more up-to-date and specific criticism of the Chinese Communist Party, its policies, or its leadership often will be. It's hardly a matter of course to the outside world what the opaque information control process in China will be doing at any given time.