HN user
A friend of mine has a startup in China. He told me a year ago that the law already required his company to talk with government officials every month. They also needed to create a backdoor API according to a well-written specification for the government to access all the information in the database.
Got rejected by several hackathons. Once I was rejected but my friend (similar college, same previous hackathon experience, significantly less experienced than me but is a girl) was accepted. And I just got a summer intern from a well-known tech company a week ago.
It also supports iCloud
To answer your questions: Chinese government obviously bothers and is very concerned, for many cultural and historical reasons that cannot be easily summarized. Provinces do not have so much power. It's completely different from US. China has been a centralized country since ancient time and the communist party is really good at executing the decision of the central government.
Of course you can buy it. In fact it's pretty popular. http://www.amazon.cn/%E4%B8%80%E4%B9%9D%E5%85%AB%E5%9B%9B-%E... Other books like The Brave New World are also openly sold.