And BlackBerry tried in Pakistan and "succeeded" - at least in delaying the shutdown of its servers by another month.

It's easier to do it in countries where "freedom" was the status quo and then the government decides to do something like that. China isn't exactly a free country to begin with, and the Great Firewall was older than Google in China.

Blackberry caved and gave the Saudi's and other gulf nation the ability to decrypt the traffic, as usual money plays a bigger role than morals. Not that morals played anything in the decision to begin with BB calculated that it would cost them more to cave than to resist in terms of because it could sway existing customers to switch away from their platform, that was true for Pakistan but since Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have money it wasn't true in that case. And if you are implying that Kazakhstan was "free" to begin with that's utterly wrong, you are also wrong about China the "Great Firewall" didn't came online until 2003, and they still do not implement wide scale SSL MITM attacks (I've used Internet in China that wasn't a special line for foreigners or was routed through HK and many sites like wikipedia for example were blocked over HTTP but not over HTTPS). That said fighting such activity by boycotting only aggravates the situation as you are doing even more harm to the people of the country, it's bad enough being monitored 24/7 but at least you have access to information and people from all over the world.

China is a large enough market that Chinese services (Baidu, Weibo, QQ, etc) can fill the gap. And there's many companies that did play ball (Microsoft).

Kazahstan could just use Baidu, but it's really best for Chinese speakers, and it would give leverage to China (which they might be leery of).