Are you sure that's really them backing down, and not just a way to obfuscate the issue? Technically yes, installing the certificate is voluntary; it's just that if you don't install it you won't be able to access the internet anymore when the government starts MITMing your connections.

Let's say they make it mandatory. Would it be possible for a group of people with one having unfettered access because, say, they cross the border all the time to a place that has full Internet, and they use wget to tar/gzip entire sites, places this on a server in a city, and provides access with a self-signed cert that everyone involved with knows about.

Or failing that, some kind of digital dead drop with the files. If this could be updated a few times a week, that's better than not having access to material that you don't want the government to know about. It has to be possible.

Folks should also periodically get fingerprints of sites they often use and keep logs of them, so that you might notice if something changes.

example:

    openssl s_client -servername www.paypal.com -connect www.paypal.com:443 < /dev/null 2>/dev/null | openssl x509 -fingerprint -noout -in /dev/stdin                                                 
    SHA1 Fingerprint=E8:20:7A:27:8C:BE:D4:D9:7F:44:32:89:E7:6B:13:DD:CE:58:50:F6

Perhaps put all the sites you visit into a text file and loop through them into a date based file or append with date stamps. If enough people did this, you could probably even spot when an entire region is doing something shady or a company was potentially compromised.

Also see https://www.eff.org/observatory and https://www.grc.com/fingerprints.htm

They are not backing down, they just saying meaningless words. My wife phone is MITMed right now and she can't open facebook, for example. How is it voluntary?