The things you see on Amazon are bought by the container-load from China and sent to Amazon's warehouses for fulfilment. This change will encourage that sort of business because it'll no longer be worthwhile sending direct from China (as the likes of dx.com and aliexpress do now).
While Amazon won't tell us, I think you are incorrect. A huge fraction of the cheap clone items you see listed are not in Amazon warehouses but are shipped direct from China. Fully half of my Amazon purchases over the past year have been direct shipped from China, to the point where now I check Alibaba first before purchasing something from Amazon if the item is unimportant enough that I don't care about the risk of getting a cheap counterfeit.
AliExpress is doing that too. I'm in Spain, and I literally just received an SMS for a shipment from "SINOTRANS" which is what AliExpress uses to ship in bulk from China then fulfill locally.
Aliexpress is the consumer-facing side of Alibaba, which is the 5th largest internet company by revenue. The fact they're doing this isn't at all surprising.
