Apparently nowadays you can buy a physical book but not talk about it online. Guess my conclusion still stands.

In-depth view into Chinese censorship: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/why-1984-a...

maybe not the book itself, but if you read the article you'll see that even weirder stuff are banned:

The government disallows the publication of any work by Liu Xiaobo, the determined critic of the Communist Party who in 2017 became the first Nobel Peace Prize winner since Nazi times to die in prison. Again, for a time last year Chinese citizens could not type 19, 80, and four in sequence—but they could, and still can, buy a copy of 1984, the most famous novel on authoritarianism ever written. Prefer Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World? They can buy that text, too, just as easily, although its title also joined the taboo list last winter.