This is hardly new
I used to run into this regularly more than a decade ago: on call you would get a ticket for "high latency", where the traceroute would show big jumps in latency, while routing through a series of IP's with no rDNS, whose whois data would reveal them to be owned by China Telecom. Aggressive filtering of China Telecom's AS from free and transit peers sort of fixed it, but obviously it's not a complete solution.
Having a Beijing dark fiber ring as well was also interesting: IKE packets going across the ring would magically disappear, in an obvious attempt to force unencrypted traffic. It's almost as if the Middle Kingdom wants to live up to it's name :-)