So China blocked github, and then eventually relented because it was too useful for people in China. Why wouldn't the same thing possibly happen to IPFS?
Because it's not useful? Make IPFS useful - only then can it be used against censorship. Otherwise it ends up like Tor: Something governments can block without consequence.
Maybe you have an example of how IPFS could so useful to China that it would revert a block, but it seems to me that the reason of existence and purpose of IPFS goes against the tide of Chinese governement preventing it from ever being useful to them.
The government has limits on how much it can defy economics - if it inflicts too much unnecessary economic damage on its corporate powerbase, they'll go support other factions, who promise to rectify this.