You need to think about the threat model for someone living in that kind of state:
1. Radio transmitters are by definition easy to detect: once you get identified, you are in a world of trouble because you demonstrated full knowledge that you were doing something illegal. Anything which can be used to circumvent the Great Firewall will be treated as a threat to state security even if you personally are only using it for a less serious crime.
2. Blockchains are a censor's dream: you have a full signed confession of every transaction made by the person you just compromised and a list of everyone they corresponded with. If you catch someone new and have ways to get them to talk (China has a well-honed system for this), now you have that for all of their past transactions, too. Have a few undercover agents tell people about this mesh networking app and you can quietly roll up an entire network over time while making it look like the police just happened to get lucky breaks a lot.
3. Blockchains are hard to conceal: they require huge amounts of data transfer and you have to be online at the time you make a transaction, both of which dramatically increase the challenges of trying to be covert.
All of those combine into a huge problem for using blockchains: you don't need to worry about any of that or the extra expense _unless_ you're doing something illegal. That means that simply participating is inherently risky — better hope that you don't ever make internet traffic which would show an interest in this or have someone audit the apps installed on your devices — and the costs are guaranteed to be high because everyone involved is taking on the extra risk of whatever you're doing (and the chance that you're not being completely honest about the level of risk or are compromised) leading to scrutiny and/or that you will fail your opsec in a way which provides proof of their noncompliance.
No matter what you think of the Chinese system or whether it's right, it seems like a system designed to expose its users to significant risk in addition to whatever it is that they're trying to hide.