alt Hacker NewsChina has very few IPv4 addresses per capita. Here in Hangzhou, China, I have to pay China Telecom 850 CNY per year just to get an IPv4 address. That's not a trivial amount of money for us. And among the three major telecom operators, only one even offers this service.
IPv4 in China must be complicated, I would probably look into IPv6 if I were based in China, or China specific protocols, or perhaps there's some IP addresses that China has embargoed and reserved for their own? Such that inside China they resolve to china but outside China they resolve somewhere else?
On the other hand, it's not really that complicated. Cost seems to be around 10USD per month, which is what another user mentioned. And the GDP per capita of china is around 12000 USD per year, so it works out to a bit more than 1% of a salary, not sure if my maths are wrong, but from the perspective of a service provider, it still sounds like a sensible price point.
India has a lower GDP per capita, but I know that they make non profit collective efforts to massively lower prices.
Note also that a substantial part of the value and purpose of IP addresses comes from their cost. There is a PoW/PoS mechanism that associates some cost to some identity (similar to domain names), and this is part of the mechanism by which networks filter malicious traffic and defend against sybil attacks.
So 10$/month might be expensive, but it's probably the right price. If it were much cheaper than that, like 1$/month, or even 0.1$/month, abuse would rise, especially in China which, no offense, but doesn't seem to value the notions of civil law like contracts, Terms of Service or copyright dearly. At least they don't do it out of malice like Russia, it's just a difference of values, but it's probably for the better that IPv4 addresses are 10$/month, if it were 0.1$/month, I would probably just block the whole country.