Maybe it's because I only see the English-language internet, but I'm curious if there are any notable free software projects that have originated from China? I believe OpenResty was originally developed at Taobao and then later on taken up at CloudFlare. Are there any others?
Apisix is a great api gateway with ton of Chinese drivers. I swear I have a bunch of other places I've been impressed to.
I hate to say it, but it worries me a lot that we have this feeling. I think we are more insensitive, less aware of what efforts are out there. We focus too much on well known existing projects. That we would consider the question this way indicates that we are simply less connected with what's happening than we used to be, we're more spread out.
To be fair, these are the only examples I can think of and I only learned of these as I'm standing up new data infra using starrocks.
https://merics.org/en/report/china-bets-open-source-technolo...
While Chinese developers appear to have been quite prolific contributions, it seems that China is now moving toward establishing its own platforms, foundations, and projects within its own Internet.
https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/Paddle
Also, Baidu have quite a few OSS projects out there in general.
Did you not read Vonnegut's Slapstick (1976). They're everywhere!
The bulk of it is on gitee.com since China skews towards a NIH bent dating back to dynastic times.