It’s amazing how behind-the-curve mainstream American media can be. It seems that CNET is just now realizing that search traffic in China gets hijacked and re-routed.
The article speculates that the Chinese government is doing this. This is a pretty stupid speculation. Last time I ran into this issue, I found that a Chinese government router had been hacked to redirect all traffic to Yahoo! That was two years ago, BTW, when this practice was already well-established and widespread in China. The practice of hacking PCs and routers to steal search defaults is rampant in China (and elsewhere), and there is financial motive enough without blaming it on the governments.