You make a compelling argument, but if the PBoC really wanted all trading to cease, they would have issued official orders to every single exchange in mainland China. This would have been made very clear and there would have been no wiggle room.
I have a felling that the PBoC knows something fishy is going on at Chinese exchanges, and that earlier statement on ICOs was a warning shot to all exchanges to get them to fix their shit.
The fact that the big exchanges have not received official notices from the PboC is very telling!
Also, are you aware of this:
If you are not aware, chinese companies are not the most clean. They are riddled with abuse and fraud and these exchanges are definitely no exception to that. Okcoin for example wants to take a "miner fee" of 0.01 ETH to withdraw which they say is strictly their network charge. You and I know that that's ridiculous. Actually what the transaction fee comes out at the end is 0.0003. So you can imagine how much they are banking from just that.
Back to the exchange banning. There are 2 things involved.
China likes to send some chills before getting directly involved. The document i linked should have been enough for all exchanges to start acting. We saw this happen with a number of exchanges but of course the big exchanges want to play deaf until they are "given a notice" just because of the amount of money they are making on a daily basis. It acts for a cushion for them if they exit at the latest they can.
While the narrative is to clean up fraud and market risk etc. there is political/economic agenda which people aren't really aware of. Chinese citizens have been pouring millions of RMB into these virtual currencies instead of the more traditional investments that make good face for China's economy. Instead these funds (in virtual currencies) can be very easily moved offshore and cashed in for property investment etc. So the purpose here is not to stop virtual currencies but to have as much CNY cashed out back into flowing hands. Ask yourself, if exchanges were bad, why didn't BTCChina immediately suspend? Simply, this is a strategy to increase fear among the Chinese crypto holders so that they gradually starve the exchanges of their assets and naturally exit in the form of CNY. If there was an immediate and swift shutdown of all exchanges, there would be too sudden of a price shift, causing a huge amount of grief among anyone who had invested.
What we are seeing now is the beginning a slow but deadly squeeze. Other exchanges will follow one by one .