I'm most interesting in how the unfolding events affect the miners. Over 50% of mining compute is happening in China, would the state step in and try to control this aspect as well? My understanding is this would give them to power to make arbitrary changes to the blockchain.

As the article mentions, miners have expenses to pay which are likely funded by bitcoin conversion to local currency, if they can't operate in China (especially favorable because of inexpensive power) the controlling nodes will be moving or shifting to other mining firms.