How censoring China’s open-source coders might backfire

I did not know that the Chinese communists created and allowed a Chinese Github to exist.

"On May 18, thousands of software developers in China woke up to find that their open-source code hosted on Gitee, a state-backed Chinese competitor to the international code repository platform GitHub, had been locked and hidden from public view.

Later that day, Gitee released a statement explaining that the locked code was being manually reviewed, as all open-source code would need to be before being published from then on. The company “didn’t have a choice,” it wrote. ... it is widely assumed that the Chinese government had imposed yet another bit of heavy-handed censorship.

For the open-source software community in China, which celebrates transparency and global collaboration, the move has come as a shock. Code was supposed to be apolitical. Ultimately, these developers fear, it could discourage people from contributing to open-source projects, and China’s software industry will suffer from the lack of collaboration. ...
GitHub, founded in 2008 and acquired by Microsoft in 2018, is the go-to platform developers around the world use to publish their code and then critique and learn from each other. This publicly available code—as opposed to the proprietary code created by companies or individuals—is referred to as open-source software. Of the 73 million people using GitHub as of 2021, 7.5 million are based in China, making them the largest group outside the United States. ..."

How censoring China’s open-source coders might backfire | MIT Technology Review Many suspect the Chinese state has forced Gitee, the Chinese competitor to GitHub, to censor open-source code in a move developers worry could obstruct innovation.