The Chinese are actually a SemenStorm proxy, they've been mass recruiting troops and getting gold for them for awhile now.
Or at least that's what my anonymous source says
Eh not really, that army gear included is actually all mine that I gave to them since I didn't want to keep playing Strategus.
I taught them how to play strategus abit, told them to trade in hero party/hosp/occitan lands and told those guys not to attack them, but otherwise they have just been doing their own thing for a while since I told them to just have some fun.
Smoothrich and co actually wanted to attack them since they just "leech s&d without helping" but never bothered to yet.
Most of the players in their strategus faction don't really understand strat too well, what with it being in english and all so they are stuck at 100troops which is unfortunate and also means they only have a couple actively doing trading.
Basically what i'm trying to say is these are just some dudes trying to have fun in Strategus, don't group them as "gold/troop farmers" since I made sure that they would just do what they found fun instead of being AFK farmers for a bunch of nerds(even if it's what some people wanted them to do)
As for why they attacked- i'm not sure because I haven't talked to them in a while since strategus is tedious and boring, considering the teamspeak is astralis one though I would guess the person who speaks mandarin in astralis (sorry I forgot your name) contacted them about helping to take down NH, but that is just a guess.