Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was a very different country 10 years ago. It was comparable to the EU (I lived in both).
Even ten years ago, there were things like the Great Firewall and strict laws preventing any crowdsourced mapping on national security grounds (so OpenStreetMap never quite took off in China). Sure, things were a little freer, but China and the EU were definitely not comparable.
Great firewall is coming to the EU soon.