Valentina Palladino, Ars Technica:

Apple began notifying Chinese iCloud customers of the forthcoming handoff of its cloud service to the Chinese company Guizhou on the Cloud Big Data (GCBD), which will take over local operations starting February 28. However, TechCrunch reported that some non-Chinese iCloud accounts have been notified of this change. Some users with US-based billing addresses and connections to the US App Store received the notification email stating the physical location of their iCloud data will change come February.

So there are people who do not (or no longer) reside in China, but their iCloud accounts will be force migrated.

According to Apple’s help page on the issue, your iCloud’s country or region setting dictates whether or not your account will be part of the migration.

Interesting. And I’ve read that China is cracking down on people who live in China but change their region code so their data remains outside the country.

If you don’t live in China, but your data is tagged for movement, consider changing your region code, as discussed in this support page.