This article is... not great journalism.
Some Chinese startups are adopting open-source databases instead of Oracle and IBM. One of them, PingCAP's TiDB [1], happens to be built by a Chinese startup. And that's it? I was expecting to hear that the cold dead hand of the Chinese Communist Party was forcing this, but no, it seems to be simple capitalism at play -- nobody wants to pay the Oracle tax if they can avoid it.