>China Telecom is a global transit provider. As a sibling commenter mentioned, the document doesn't show that traffic actually went to China, just that China Telecom was an available path -- even assuming traffic transited their network, it's unreasonable to assume it actually transited through China without a traceroute at least;

The paper is based upon data from the DIMES project, which uses many volunteer-contributed nodes to run traceroutes and pings. See https://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0506099.pdf