Beijing wants to level up China's software industry, with an emphasis on FOSS

Any state that wants to build digital competency needs to use FOSS. You want people to learn the intricacies of systems to be in control of your infrastructure. That China has its own Linux distribution (the name red flag linux never fails to put a smile on my face) is a testament to proactive thinking.

China is also an authoritarian surveillance state. Sadly western nations only mirror the surveillance part, not the digital competency one. If you put a number on the costs of these surveillance ambitions, it probably is in the magnitude of whole generations that put their back on political engagement in any form. All that is left are true believers in ultimate state authority.

For China it works because they can attest a lot of growth, people feel their lives are turning to the better. I guess at some point they will demand freedom too, although that may be a process that also takes generations.

I always found lack of participation from the Chinese community in large free software projects like Gnome jarring: translations would just show up, but you wouldn't see them complaining about bad/hard to translate strings and similar.

There is either a linguistic or a cultural divide, but I don't see how government policy can change that.

Maybe it's just the fact that free software is portrayed as "communist" by detractors, and they've got enough of it at home :)

The MIT licensed Essence Operating System is a good stylistic match for the laconic mindset of the Chinese unfettered by Communist Party idealogues. Vector based screen rendering at speed and smallsize. Greenfield new start. Gnome is possibly a political quagmire and there are corner use cases where it has been unresponsive to user wants, such as, the cause of TUI/GUI crashes to Emacs using the Gsomething X toolkit, doesn't happen to Lucid.