The cause of this is:
* Android needs to know if a wifi network is working, since many wifi networks are broken and connecting to them degrades the user experience.
* Normally it does that by connecting to
google.com, and if the connection succeeds, assume wifi is good to go.
*
Google.com is blocked in china, meaning wifi would be broken in China.
* To fix this, Samsung has replaced
google.com with
qq.com in china.
* Samsung also needs to add a new DNS server to resolve qq.com, in case the network doesn't provide a DNS server and androids default of Google DNS is used (which is also blocked in China). Adding it last means it won't be used unless other DNS servers are broken.
Overall, this behaviour seems like the simplest and most logical fix Samsung could put in place to enable their users to use phones in China.
They could have run their own servers (but that would also have privacy issues), or they could have removed captive portal/bad network detection, but that probably would have broken some apps and led to unhappy users.
I can't see any other real fix in this case, and I certainly don't see any malicious intent in any of their actions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24816764