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There are two things about Snapchat that rub Chinese authorities the wrong way:

1) Ephemeral messaging. They want to keep records of what people are saying.

2) Reputation for sexting. Pornography is a major target for censorship in China.

Has it been proven that snap does not record messages?

Has it been disputed that Snap, a publicly traded company who will fall under GDPR, with thousands (?) of employees, are not recording messages?

> how could Snapchat possibly be threatening to the Chinese government?

Any messaging system that the Chinese government isn't able to assert control over and have access to gets banned.

It's running on Google infra, of course it's banned.

there's an "open source" Google App Engine called AppScale that can run outside Google Cloud.

Managing the software used to run a cloud platform isn't the hardest part of running a cloud platform. It would be a significantly larger effort for Snap to run and manage their own physical infrastructure. It's a big reason why Google Cloud is a service that makes money.

They also seem to run on AWS, so not necessarily a problem. http://fortune.com/2017/02/09/snap-inc-signs-big-aws-deal/