It's not impossible to deviate around weather when the Chinese say no.....it just requires more negotiation.
A few months ago on the way to PEK where were about 100nm west of track (because no deviations to East approved) and flying between two lines of storms.
Suddenly our good mate from Guangzhou tells us were are heading towards a restricted area and we must turn either left or right......
Well we can't......(and a lot of these 'restricted' areas are not marked)
We started off with "unable to comply due weather" etc etc and when that didn't work we explained (in plain English) that there are big storms on both sides of us and we don't fly into thunderstorms.....
The controller wouldn't budge and kept insisting that we must turn either left or right.....all we could give him was 10 degrees left or right, but that wasn't enough......he wouldn't budge.
So we declared a PAN......he transferred us to another frequency (I'm assuming the supervisor) and we were cleared on present heading and requested to turn right (east) as soon as we could.
No problems.
No bogey's on our six.....no missiles coming our way.
We popped in a report the next day (and not surprisingly, never heard anything about it).
It's a regular occurrence, and as long as it's handled properly it's not dangerous....just bloody frustrating!!!!!!!
As long as you keep talking to the controller, keep escalating the situation, tell him what you're doing, use the correct words and also keep monitoring 121.5 then your safe as houses.....you're not going to get shot down.
Eternity.