So with hours to go before the ban, BCTChina added direct bank transfers as funding and withdrawal options again. The last few weeks they only hat the voucher system operating.
I'm not sure that this is really great good news.
As I understand it, last December Chinese banks were forbidden to deal in bitcoins themselves, and payment processors were told to stop making bitcoin-based payments and feeding bitcoin exchanges by jan/31.
BTC-China prudently stopped using banks and payment processors right away, and switched to "vouchers" (actually cryptographic keys) that one could buy through e-commerce sites like Taobao. (Vouchers were not a sucess, the trade volume fell to less than 10%.) OKCoin continued using their corporate bank account for deposits and withdrawals. Huobi first used the CEO's personal bank account but later switched to a corporate one.
I do not know whether the OKCoin/Huobi solution is acceptable to the government, or they will have to stop on jan/31. But the market's behavior and BTC-China's decision seem to suggest that it will keep working for the time being.
On the other hand, selling vouchers through e-commerce sites effectively turns the latter into payment processors. Chinese regulators are not so dumb that they could not see that. Thus, it was no surprise that the main Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba/Taobao stopped selling BTC-China's vouchers by Jan/14 (ahead of the deadline). WIth their presumed "safe" system cut off, I guess that BTC-China then decided to risk the OKCoin solution.
So, my conclusion is that it will be easier to move CNY in/out of BTC-China, but even harder to use USD or other currencies there. BTC-China will now be able compete with Huobi and OKCoin in more even terms. The three of them will probably continue to operate normally beyond jan/31.
Good news for bulls, bad news for bears, I suppose.
Does this make sense?