China is frequently reported as the source of many politically motivated cyber-attacks. Yet, there have been very few studies on the people behind such attacks, also known as hacktivists. In this paper, we have taken a step back and studied some of the reasons behind the rise of freelance hacktivism emanating from China. Using various criminological theories, as well as political and sociological approaches, we propose a novel theoretical framework behind Chinese hacktivism. Furthermore, we present an empirical analysis on the membership growth patterns of online Chinese hacktivist forums and use the observed patterns to support our proposed framework.