While change.org states their opinion that "It's pretty clear the attack is in response to the [Ai Weiwei] campaign" and strongly implies that it's the Chinese

While change.org states their opinion that "It's pretty clear the attack is in response to the [Ai Weiwei] campaign" and strongly implies that it's the Chinese government responsible, it seems a bit of a leap to me. First, DDOS is not something that the Third Department seems to do much of. They'd be much more likely to spearphish people at change.org and then host some malicious code on the website. The "Jasmine Revolution" calls for protest was something that the entire party was very pissed about, but those calls emerged from a relatively small blogging service based in north carolina that would have been easy to take down - yet nothing happened. Second, DDoS source country != DDoS controller. This should be obvious to everyone. Obviously when anon DDoS'd paypal et al. most of that traffic was coming from the US, but no one thinks the US was behind it. China has some of the highest rates of infected computers on the net, obviously many of those will be in bot nets that can be rented for any purpose. When you hire zombies it's quite possible to specify what countries you want them to be in. Clearly it's become quite common to blame China for hacking very quickly. A lot of the time that's only based on something like the IP address of the CnC host being based in Beijing. The difference here is that's usually a safe bet because of the PLA's massive ongoing program of malware based espionage. Here they really don't have the same history. I'm sure a program like change.org has a lot of people who don't like them, and who better in this environment to try to blame your bad actions on than China? Hell, the story is a big potential boost for change.org publicity too. At the current time the web site seems to be dealing pretty well. Surprisng considering a spot like that should be able to fall to just a handful of computers doing slow posts.