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A Hong Kong protest forum becoming inaccessible to Chinese users is the entire objective of the DDoS in the first place.

If you are a site aimed at people in Hong Kong (or elsewhere in China), that is not very helpful.

Collateral damage aside, that doesn't really solve the issue. The attack goes something like this:

1. non-chinese user visits a chinese site

2. the traffic goes through the gfw, which inserts malicious javascript

3. the user executes the malicious javascript and starts ddosing the victim site

Blocking chinese users won't help, since non-chinese visitors will still ddos your site.

If China is cut off, then people can't download the malicious JS either. Granted, it sets a pretty bad precedent and would have massive economic consequences.