Unfortunately, after seeing the firewall logs of several Internet facing machines in distinct hosting providers in different parts of the world, it's quite interesting to notice that 90% if not more of the port scans, http vulnerability scans, among others, come from network blocks from that part of the planet.
Even more illuminating that if their great firewall is so advanced, being able to block anything on a need basis, is not concerned on blocking these.
My understanding was the great firewall isn't so advanced. It is essentially a filter system, run in quite a manual fashion (i.e eyeballs on screens assessing if things should be blocked).
I'm not refuting attacks originating from china, there is piles of evidence that support this.
Things to keep in mind - there are more internet users in china, than anywhere else, so there is going to be more of 'everything' from china. One needs to convert the stats into per-capita ratios before making meaningful conclusions about % of attacks etc.
My main issue (in my original post) is the jump from "Attack from Chinese IP addresses on gmail accounts" to "China attacked us [The US]" - without any qualification.
It promotes a nationalistic 'Us against Them' mentality that is primarily based on hysteria rather than fact.
Just because I haven't commented before doesn't make my comment less valid... does it?