Generating a 301 is likely more work. Profile pages are simple database hits, and they may be dynamically or even statically cached (for popular pages). You're probably severely underestimating how much traffic China can produce [1].
It just says given this URL, we return an header that tells the browser to redirect. The only thing faster would be just dropping the connection as soon as its given to you.
> redirect the workload to some Chinese government's website and let them suffer what they've created.
I'm not saying this is a great idea, just that something could be done.