Tencent et al already get a single digit percentage of their revenue from minor users on online games. It will not kill them.
There is also a massively underdeveloped market for single player Chinese games that is only recently starting that will benefit massively from this decision.
true, but how likely is it that those will get the ax too?
Judging from past top down decisions like this, it seems more likely that companies or parents will over implement this and extend it to appease the higher ups. (Until they correct and clarify their initial statement... rinse and repeat)
From the wording of the notice, it seems that the government is aware that it's literally impossible to regulate offline games. People will just pirate them.
Single player doesn't prevent them from being tied to an online service. Even in America, lots of modern "single player" games don't run without a connection to the internet.
These services could easily institute the same limitations on their SP games; forcing them to do online checks on certain events. They could even be sneaky about it by punishing you if you try to evade the checks somehow by deleting your save game, making the game more difficult, or employing other techniques used to dissuade pirates.
They can also do forced updates on software to fix any exploits, run background services that force kill executables, and a bunch of other stuff. Mobile devices are especially well locked down. It just depends on how badly the company wants to keep kids from playing the games. They just need to make it too big of a pain to worry about for 99.99% of gamers, then report the other 0.01% of troublemakers to the authorities.
There is also a massively underdeveloped market for single player Chinese games that is only recently starting that will benefit massively from this decision.