Political posturing would be my first guess.

China also used to posture with "we don't need Nvidia chips" in Q1 this year. But now, schemes to ship those chips anyway are being uncovered - in the wake of Jensen's ousting and in general. Some involve direct shipments, and others involve offshored datacenters being established by Chinese companies to supply compute to China. So we know this "we don't need" was always fake. Chinese government was saying "we don't need them chips" with one hand and devising ways of keeping the supply going with the other.