There are innocent users outside China who like to view innocent websites inside China. If you block the connection, you make the innocent users, and the innocent websites, mad. They might very well interpret it as censorship.
That's not the issue. The issue is that there is speech accompanying the malware, which should not be systematically censored. (Though any individual is free to do so for themselves.)
> The issue is that there is speech accompanying the malware
I'm either misunderstanding what you're saying, or it doesn't make sense. If a bunch of people take signs (with legitimate messages, free speech) and hang them off a bridge over the highway (causing accidents), then those people go jail. The fact that their message is free speech is irrelevant. The source of the message is being punished/jailed, not the message.
Another iteration of this and we'll have bullets with text on them and killing someone with those bullets will be an expression of free speech. The degree to which the 'free speech' analogy is contorted is amazing, more so because the original scope was quite narrow, both legal and geographical.
The problem is closer to a ne'er-do-well taking someone else's signs and hanging them off a bridge over a highway. The person producing the speech is having their speech hijacked for malicious purposes by an MITM; that doesn't mean that it's not censorship when the sign's/webpage's creator gets caught in the censorship crossfire during the attempt to take down the malicious actor.
To put it another way: if someone steals my car and uses it to rob a bank, even if that car is now evidence in a criminal investigation, it's still my car. The police have every right to confiscate it from the thief—it's not their car—but that doesn't mean that it suddenly belongs to them; it belongs to me. In both this case and the above case, I have a right to not be unduly punished for the actions of an unrelated third party (by having my website taken down; or by having my car permanently confiscated, respectively.)
The context here is very similar to a story that was on HN just yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21671579). Banning a site from the internet for happening to be MITMed by China is very similar in its ethical implications to banning a site from the Internet for happening to have a domain-name that fits a pattern used by a botnet.
At this point we really need to start doing the "You wanted a Great Firewall? Enjoy. You now have no connection."
Removing China from the internet would also likely cause things that phone home to China to break. That would actually create some consumer awareness to boot.
