[paulitex]

No. (having lived in China for multiple years) Pretty much all the political issues the West thinks of WRT China are not even given a cursory thought by most Chinese. China just isn't very political. Taiwan is basically a non-issue. Tibet is completely a non-issue.

More to the topic: It's much more likely that the motivations are financial.

[dnsworks]

And who do you think pays these people to ddos sites like slideshare and posterous? (both of whom have been my customers during massive ddos's from China). I'm sure there's like one posting somewhere on Posterous that someone in the Chinese government didn't like, so they paid their team of script kiddies for time on their botnets to bully Posterous around. The same thing happened to Slideshare a few years ago.

It's about China bullying people around and trying to censor the internet.

[jhancock]

Your assertion that the China gov sponsors and pays for this is mostly unwarranted. I say mostly, as I can see why someone without experience in what goes on internal to the China gov may think such things. But you still have no evidence. Most Chinese Windows XP installs are virus platforms ready made to be transformed into a bot-net army. These PCs could be controlled by just about anyone/anywhere. The main reasons they are virus ridden is (1) the PCs use unlicensed copies of Windows and MS does not allow updates and (2) Chinese software add-ons (browser tools, chat tools, etc) are particularly vulnerable, many times by design to allow easy access by the distributor, and (3) most software installed is pirated which may also contain virus payloads.

As an example of how outdated a typical Windows XP install is in China, I'm running a site which has 95% traffic from China. Over 62% of users are on IE6.

[dnsworks]

So then, patriotic hackers (riiiiiiiiiight) like to target American websites that are critical of the Chinese government because they feel a sense of nationalistic pride? Bullshit.