Yes, you can put the orphaned transactions back in the mempool to be processed again. But what if the Bitcoins in those transactions are already spent on the "w

Yes, you can put the orphaned transactions back in the mempool to be processed again. But what if the Bitcoins in those transactions are already spent on the "winning" fork? Does it now mean that the wait for a transaction to be considered "confirmed" needs to be longer the conventional six blocks and potentially arbitrarily long? China already banned non-state sanctioned VPNs in 2018. Anyone circumventing the Great Firewall via "obfuscated transports" could get into legal trouble by the Chinese authority. The Chinese government successfully suppressed all dissidents and millions of protesters in 1989. Underestimate its force at your own peril. The whole point of the article is that a centralized entity (the Chinese government) may be able to attack Bitcoin without controlling any mining power. A hard fork in response to actions of a centralized entity could shatter people's confidence in Bitcoin's promise of being decentralized. Blocking Chinese IP ranges in a 100% reliable way is going to very difficult. This defense is also rendered useless if someone does use a VPN to propagate the Chinese fork (perhaps intentionally by a centralized entity).