None of my two Chinese boxes are clearing AFN.
Comrades, this is not only AFN that is using some new and yet unknown technique for protection.
There are also Discovery / Animal Planet as well as Sony channels on many satellites (including Asiasat 7 @ 105.5°, Intelsat 20 @ 68.5°, Intelsat 19 @ 166°E and many others).
As far as I know there are no Chinese receivers capable of cracking the new PowerVU protection (by the way as far as I can see Sony and Discovery are using different methods to enhance their PowerVU protection).
Most likely all the methods involve updating the official receivers' firmware. In order to understand the new protection algorithms we need to disassembele the latest receivers' firmware and reverse-engineer the new algorithms hidden deep in the firmware.
By the way, what is the CPU core in those official providers' receivers?