I was looking at this Chinese website https://www.huobi.com/# which is considered trusted and secure, and their bitcoin is generally traded around $1500 each, which is considerably lower than U.S. (look at https://www.bitstamp.net/ , around $1700) So....what's the deal here? Why there's such a large price gap and no body is doing arbitrage?
If an exchange has higher prices then it means you cannot get dollars out. Maybe you cannot get dollars into this exchange?
Rmb seems to be loosely linked to the USD, but it's not pegged, it apreciated than depreciated significantly against USD over multiyears periods.
I have an account at BTER in China. At the moment you cannot get bitcoin out so it may be the same at this exchange. So there is no point transferring dollars in if your bitcoin are locked up. When MT Gox went bust the situation was the opposite, bitcoin was trading at a premium as no dollar wires were coming out and the only way out was to cancel the wire transfer and buy bitcoin at a premium and transfer these to your wallet or another exchange. if you didn't do this you lost everything. The solution is to wire dollars into Huobi buy bitcoin at low price then buy another crypto that can be transferred out if those prices are in line.