ICANN doesn't need the support of China to go ahead with dname but it would greatly speed up the acceptance in mainland China. I am just not sure if China's support will be all that useful if i-idns are promoted parallel to that, they should drop one in favour of the other, I agree that it makes more sense to go for a unified approach but don't forget this is still a very closed society where the Chinese government wants to control (or at least monitor) what is expressed publicly, controlling the DNS is an important factor in controlling the (local) internet. I am afraid the US govt. or even better, the UN should put some political pressure on China. In any case, ICANN should be kissing chinese govt. ass to get what they want, it could well be an agreement like that of Yahoo :| .