> In most other countries I imagine that most of the hackers are either third-party actors [...] or random 'kids'

Let's say this hypothesis is true; we should then deduce that the Chinese government is years (decades?) ahead of "developed" countries in terms of information warfare. It's quite a worrying thought.

Let's say that your hypothesis is actually false: this would mean that there is an ongoing similarly-sized info-warfare effort waged by the US government (at least), but we rarely hear about it. Again quite a worrying thought.