Another reason I think is in China the search engines have been terrible since the beginning. For example even if your search query is as specific as "ACME inc. of AAA city in BBB province" , it would be your lucky day if the first two result pages have that company's web site. What you get mostly are paid ads and shitty seo stuff. It's been like this to this day.

So not being able to rely on search, people have to memorize companies' urls, to type them into address bar and pass along to others the actual url string. Internet companies are forced to display them predominantly in ads. So a domain name that is cute/easy(often costing ridiculus amount) is all that more important in China than elsewhere.

Google please come back, it will be a net gain for humanity.