Most of the comments on both threads about this story center on whether this is malicious activity by China Telecom on behalf of the PRC. My sense is those commenters perhaps haven't read the actual story closely.

What happened here is that a small Swiss provider, Safe Host, accidentally advertised routes it shouldn't have (those routes may also have been AS-padded, as a safeguard to make them less attractive as primary routes). China Telecom mistakenly propagated those routes, and in doing so became the preferred path for a bunch of prefixes.

There appear to have been two mistakes here. China Telecom's was in propagating the Safe Host advertisements, but the crucial mistake happened at Safe Host in Switzerland, by leaking those routes in the first place.

I understand the impulse to want to live on an exciting cyberpunk Internet where major governments are constantly manipulating BGP4 to capture WhatsApp traffic or whatever, but these "mistakes" are almost always just mistakes. It doesn't help that BGP4 itself is a clownfire of mistakes duct-taped together with other mistakes: significant chunks of global Internet routing policy are bound up in regular expressions.