It's not at all hard to imagine, especially from a country who is so paranoid about backdoors from other country's operating systems that they have written their own:
For that matter, many a CS faculty at many a university have actually created their own OS. Nothing too sensational either.
> In 2009, a report presented to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission stated that the purpose of Kylin is to make Chinese computers impenetrable to competing countries in the cyberwarfare arena. The Washington Post reported that:
> China has developed more secure operating software for its tens of millions of computers and is already installing it on government and military systems, hoping to make Beijing’s networks impenetrable to U.S. military and intelligence agencies.
They all have Linux distros, sponsored nationally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:State-sponsored_Linux...