Any content hosted outside China is very slow for chinese users. So if you're serious about serving content in Mainland China, you will first need to obtain an ICP license. Only then you will be able to use the Mainland CDN and cloud instances.
And pretty much everything useful is blocked. We rolled out an update that broke our app for all of China, because cloudfront was blocked. That was a new one for me.
Having spent a painfully slow 10 hours in the airport in Beijing let me appreciate just how much of the Internet breaks when you block the biggest sites. Serve up jQuery through googleapis.com? Not in China, you don't. Hope it wasn't doing any heavy lifting for you.
That is categorically false. Chinese communism is strongly influenced by nationalism and protectionism comes from that but make no mistake that their goal is censorship.
They could easily force foreign companies to operate under a strong censorship regime if that were their main goal. Facebook basically bends to the will of every market it operates in.
However they clearly prefer local startups and makes it generally difficult for foreign companies to purely exploit the Chinese market. Joint ventures are always required at the least.
Sources tell me that the azure infrastructure there are not actually operated by microsoft, but by a subcontractor, and merely licenses the name from microsoft. I would be quite wary of assuming that microsoft policies apply there.
