As the senior operational security officer for a large multinational ISP, I find a particular irony here that many of your readers may miss: while Chinanet is busy blocking American universities, a large portion of the ISPs in the United States have already taken to blocking all of Chinanet from their own networks.
In our experience, Chinanet is one of the top 3 sources of unsolicited email, on the public Internet - they absolutely refuse to enforce their own AUPs, let alone the criminal laws of the EU, US, and other sovereigns. Granted, these laws are not technically their problem, however, these failures have lead to such a significant decrease in Chinanet's connectivity to the rest of the world that there has been some (albeit moderate) political backlash (Google is your friend here).
Chinanet seviced networks also rate very high for other types of abuse, such as distributed attacks, network reconn, etc.
Interestingly, the vast majority of Chinanet's problems originate with American customers or "hackers", and this may well be a defensive move in their eyes.
In short, I suspect there is a lot more to this than meets the eye. [name withheld]
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