If you go through the process of standing up assets in AWS China regions and using them, you will run into everything the OP has stated: local affiliate, ICP license, GFW, constrained bandwidth, IP escrow agreements, etc.

Anyone who has had to do business in China will be familiar to one degree or another. When I worked anti-piracy, we had to secretly operate in-country servers to track video websites and certain bit-torrent traffic originating there.

Getting everything stood up, and staying functional was a truly abysmal experience.