@cypherdoc: They themselves put up a high barrier: 95% for softforks. It just needs a single mid-size miner to block this.
That said, Bitcoin can be soft-/hard-/whateverforked with 51% of HP by censoring out the minority. That's pretty independent of SW.
The Chinese miners are hypnotized by Core and seemingly do whatever Core wants. Which means we have a lot of centralized power...
That is the problem. Chinese Miners are sleepwalking into trouble, taking Bitcoin with it.
Today I thought that maybe the strong stance of BitFury against big blocks is something that they might actually try to sell the exchanges? As in 'we're holding Bitcoin hostage until you give us some money to pay for the BIP101 flag...'.
Of course, these plays all break apart at some point. Hopefully at least a little bit before Bitcoin breaks.