Yes, they took it. But my understanding is that only a small proportion that made it to China even got recycled and much of it ended up in Chinese landfill or being incinerated [1]. Hence they banned accepting it.

1. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700782?ijkey=8...

At least now we can actually see the problem, instead of passing our "recycling" to developing countries and calling it good.

Yeah. Seen the news station talking about that a few months ago. Some cities are just taking the recyclables to the regular city dump's landfill like regular trash, and some are just burning it since that's cheaper than sending it to China... and I thought they said not to burn plastic? Well using an incinerator, not like a campfire... but still, feels a bit misleading. Then cities got grants to fund recycling and some cities even have mandatory recycling laws too for residents. Seems like we've all been scammed in a way, but I think the intentions of recycling is good.

China did stop doing that, but they also bought shut-down paper mills in the US, and use them to process local cardboard to higher standards and then send the QA-passing resulting pulp back to china for new cardboard production. (at least, this is what was told to me from an expert in the field who researchers these things for a living).