Likely they are late to the party. The article itself doesn't have any concrete examples or references to timelines. It just describes the general problem, which has been done by Chinese media since 2016:

http://www.chinanews.com/m/yl/2016/08-29/7987022.shtml

This article has a summary of timeline (as an image in Chinese), notice the last update was around Apr 2018, which is the latest news that I could find related to phantom bookings:

https://m.huxiu.com/article/242292.html

Nevertheless, it is also true that the problem hasn't been solved as of Apr 2018.

It is the Chinese government - they are legendary for their lack of transparency and considering having a problem known a bigger problem than a problem not being known. Not to mention crackdowns and enforcement have proven quite cyclic for things like pollution control.