Chinese games work on any DS. I can run them on my R4 as clean roms and you can IPS patch them to work on the NCard. What it means by "larger firmware chip to cope with the chinese characters" is that the MENU(pictochat, DlPlay) needs to be in chinese, which the standard 512Kb ds FW chip can't hold. The iQue games are not nukes and play fine on any flashcart, but I assume that a real iQueDS cart could not display the title in the main menu of a nintendoDS. It would probably be random letters because it can't display the chinese characters.
I have played iQue games on my japanese and american DS's without installing flashme. You guys know not of what you speak.