I think they are getting really serious this time...

Just last year, out of the blue, Xi Jinping replaced the director of the Cyberspace Administration of China with a new guy named Xu Lin (which could be deemed as some sign that Xi Jinping really cares about the functioning of this department). Xu Lin has been staying pretty quietly during the past year, contrary to the flamboyant style of his predecessor...If someone is quiet and still able to stay in his position, especially a position that is concerned by a autocratic leader, then that usually indicates that he has been doing something concrete and not just putting up a show...

In the past, although there had been a lot of talks about regulating (not indiscriminately shutting down, but regulating) VPNs in China, but technically, they still did not have the capability of achieving that goal without shutting down many business at that time. Recently, China started to enforce new cyber security rules (and laws) which, as we could see from the following instance (see [1]), requires firms operating in China, for their communication devices and software, to:

  * have regulator backdoor 
  * use domestic encryption technology
   ...

After those measures took effect, those companies, if they are still willing to operate in China, could still do their business as long as they are willing to register with the government and let the government monitor their data...And for those data channels which the government could not monitor and figure out its content, then they could easily detect them and shut them down...

My guess is, the communist regime starts to realize that it is really important for them to control the information flow in the country in a way that is firm and concrete...And by observing their North Korean neighbor (as well as the Arabian revolts in the past decade), they understand that as long as they could control their people's mind and disrupt the natural synchronization in the society, they could have an ever lasting rule even there is another great famine or some serious crisis -- and otherwise, even if their people could enjoy a certain share of economic prosperity, the government could be overthrown sooner or later as long as there are continuous occurrences of triggering events, which would be inevitable given the practical difficulty and unscalability of managing a society of one and half billion people with a centralized administration, and given the fact that many officials in the current government are really corrupt, unscrupulous and have a fairly low respect for normal humanity (for the long dehumanization tradition of the communism) at this time...

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[1] http://knowledge.freshfields.com/zh/China/r/1514/china_intro...