Death of the China Bots

Something changed on the net a few weeks ago that I think is rather interesting.  If you run a web site you might have noticed the same.  The Chinese bots suddenly disappeared from my blog.

Web site stats for a long time now have been flooded with obvious robots, all running out of China, flooding every web site with hits.  I presume they're looking for anywhere they can put spam.   Or a more sinister interpretation would be they're probing for weaknesses to break in.  Since the Chinese government runs one of the most repressive firewalls in the world I can only assume it's being done with government approval.

Then a few weeks ago, suddenly, overnight, the number of hits from Chinese bots fell to almost zero.  It might have been a random glitch, except it stayed at almost zero for days that turned into weeks.  Now I'm seeing the bot numbers slowly creep up again.  But they're still less than 10% of what they used to be.

I can only suggest one of these possibilities:

1. All of China has decided I am boring.  This is quite possible.
   
2. The Chinese government has decided to block their online criminals.  This is incredibly unlikely.
   
3. Western nations have quietly decided to block the packets of Chinese spammers and cyber criminals.  Since this would require western governments to make a  sensible decision about the net it is virtually impossible.
   
4. Google has quietly blocked the Chinese spammers from their servers.  This is quite likely.  A lot of those bots are used to artificially click ad links to make money for the web sites.  What you do is create a zillion web sites with ad and buy links to major stores.  Then for a few thousand dollars you rent from a cyber criminal a botnet to click your links tens of millions of times and thus make a few hundred thousand dollars in revenue.   Which is ripping off Google's customers.  So it makes sense that Google might have decided to block the bots.  

I'd be interested to know what's happening.