+1 to difficulty in finding exotic pet vets and supplies. Although in mainland China, chins are starting to become really really popular and more mainstream now. I went to pet shopping mall area last weekend and found that almost every shop that sells rabbits and hamsters has chins now too. They definitely breed for color variation though and not for quality, but I guess that's typical for pet shops. I haven't really seen any of the more professional breeders here in China yet.
But most of the shop owners at least are reasonably knowledgeable, and hoard the good Oxbow and Mazuri pellets for themselves, and get hay from decent sources that are mainly catering to horses. But of course they are always overboard on treats, sometimes giving chins cobs of corn in the cage to munch on, and dried carrot and other veggie slices.
And yeah, in China, chins are called 龙猫 which literally means Dragon Cat. They got the name from the Japanese cartoon which featured the Totoro character, based on a giant chinchilla. And anyways, as a marketing tool, Dragon Cat sounds cool and appeals to Chinese peoples sensibilities. If they called it some type of squirrel, rat or other rodent, people would think it's feral, and if they called it a type of rabbit, no one would pay the $100+USD price for them when rabbits sell for like $5 or $10.
Sad thing is, most of the people who buy them are parents getting their 5 year old kid a new pet. I don't know what happens to these chins eventually, but at least right now, almost any chin can be fairly easily resold so at least they aren't getting dumped in the wild or anything. It wasn't that much different in Chicago though from what I remember last time I was at a Petsmart...
I enjoyed looking at the pictures of the other rodents in that article though, some of them looked so weird!
