I think they are hedging their bets and are making a trade-off between allowing their citizens to put their savings into BitCoin and potentially letting them ru

I think they are hedging their bets and are making a trade-off between allowing their citizens to put their savings into BitCoin and potentially letting them run free financially, and also possibly wresting control of the world financial system away from the Americans. They want the US Dollar to stop being the world reserve currency. If they promote BitCoin they have an opportunity to wrest control of the world's money supply away from the US. To them, a currency that no one controls is better than a currency that the US controls. I think there's also the matter of the public ledger. An anonymized public ledger is still more information than they currently have with even the yuan about when currency is changing hands and where it is going. I think BitCoin libertarians are fooling themselves if they think the public ledger isn't a major asset to the government, who can now track money from point A to point B if it enters and leaves the BitCoin economy at an exchange endpoint.