Years ago had a similar albeit smaller discovery. Loading a flash application with a progress bar and setting the quality option to the lowest quality made the bar go faster.

I remember having a few tricks like that–I vaguely remember moving bits of the GUI for some apps off screen so they wouldn't get drawn and thus run faster.

Why China of all of the 193 countries? What about Russia? US? Brazil? England?

We've always been at war with Eastasia.

Because it's always China, maybe?

In the limited logs I've seen so far, I've seen IPs from both China and Russia.

Depends on the brain. There are people with faster metabolic rates or as one paper detailed some time ago that people with very good eye sight had to paid a higher price in terms of energy spent.