Why not use the Hadoop distributed file system? It offers automatic replication and you can treat each "store" as a "rack" to guarantee multiple remote backups.

You also get the immediate advantage of having a single file namespace and instant streaming access to all of the files from any single location.

The only advantage to Bittorrent that I can see is faster recovery time since a single store can source the backup from from N other stores (instead of 2, or whatever number of replications you have decided on).

What worries me about this is that China isn't exactly known for its pioneering efforts on behalf of minimizing the impact of the technology industry on the environment.

I would say that China already receives a good portion of the world's technology garbage. This posting provides a few details.