The Trusted Computing consortium was founded by AMD, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft. No one company owns this. The TPM chips (Trusted Platform Module) enables things like Bitlocker and whatever HP calls their drive encryption, etc. The TPM holds the unlock key and a hash of the hardware in the machine, so if say, someone took your laptop, they couldn't access the data on the drive unless it boots. If they pull the drive out, bam, it's unreadable to them. If they add a device to the laptop to piggy-back and grab the data, hash fails, bam, no boot.
It is also now being leveraged for DRM at the OS level too, so it does more than drive encryption.
The membership in the consortium is a lot bigger than just one company, or even the founding five:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing_Group#Members
Any of that hardware might leverage it under the hood. Even a TV/DVR.
On the 'China' angle, the only specifically named company that uses a China-manufactured TPM, is Lenovo, so far that I have seen.
You don't have to use the TPM to bitlocker your drive. You can still enable bitlocker with a password on boot, and not have the machine store the unlock key at all. Just go into the BIOS and turn it off, then go into Control Panels and fire up Bitlocker. You can create a password, or a 'unlock' usb key. However, it may come pre-configured on some devices, like tablets/slates. And you might not be able to turn it off.
That does not necessarily imply a backdoor, either.
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