Either someone hacked the root Baidu servers, Baidu is involved, or the network requests are being manipulated by Chinese controlled entities.

There’s a high probability this is state run. There’s probably tons of offensive cyber teams in China and these are hitting sites like Greatfire.org which documents Chinese censorship (which was also why Github was hit if I’m not mistaken).

It’s not surprising that the organs of censorship would be used to target attempts to expose said censorship.