Good hackers have neither the time nor the inclination to jump through silly hoops like this.

The only conclusion you can draw from this is that China has lots of bored hackers with time on their hands...

Does the same apply to topcoder? http://community.topcoder.com/stat?c=country_avg_rating

Not the same thing, Topcoder is actually crowdsourcing isn't it?

By the same token, you could take a look at the top users (or just number of users in general) in project euler and note that China doesn't have a particularly huge representation:

http://projecteuler.net/eulerians

http://projecteuler.net/countries

You can't draw the kind of conclusion the New Statesman has from just one website.