Generating a 301 is likely more work. Profile pages are simple database hits, and they may be dynamically or even statically cached (for popular pages). You're probably severely underestimating how much traffic China can produce [1].
A 301 avoids a database hit, and avoids having to go through the cache framework all together.
It just says given this URL, we return an header that tells the browser to redirect. The only thing faster would be just dropping the connection as soon as its given to you.
If verizon and the like can hold up traffic to/from Netflix... couldn't they just do the same for chinese traffic? Maybe redirect requests for baidu to a chinese version of google?
I'm not saying this is a great idea, just that something could be done.
