Destroying the satellites--or enough of them to sufficiently degrade Starlink's ability to operate in mainland China--would be a very expensive bit of overkill

Destroying the satellites--or enough of them to sufficiently degrade Starlink's ability to operate in mainland China--would be a very expensive bit of overkill with a great deal of international blowback. Destroying one satellite with an ASAT weapon annoys everyone, but the consequences are somewhat limited; the debris from destroying hundreds or thousands in orbit is pretty much a casus belli. China still maintains enough authoritarian elements that it'd be easier to crackdown any dissidents using Starlink instead. Nation states have been tracking rogue radio signals by spies for decades, and they've got the resources to monitor for them. If Starlink were to pose a problem in China, that's how they'd go about it. Destroying the satellites would be way too flashy. There's also the added benefit--from their perspective--that Starlink's mere presence would be a filter for their domestic surveillance; anyone willing to go through the effort of buying a likely illegal antenna, setting it up, and then trying to disguise it is the exact sort of person they'd want to monitor. Which is a pretty depressing thing to think about.