Traditionally, China doesn't have a strong open source culture and Github was being blocked every now and then. Hopefully a Github clone backed by big players can change that.
The code hosting service under discussion is based on Gitlab, developed and operated by CSDN staff. Tencent became a sponsor this year.
And because there are not enough open source projects and contributors in China, we are instead building user community around open source projects at first. It will be a little different with Github way.
That might be an excellent way to demonstrate the power of FOSS to a small but growing community in China...
Side note: I have been closely involved in the Chinese Fedora community; assisting and streamlining procedures within the community and getting the community members closer aligned with the project and project goals. As a project we actually haven't treated Asia or China any different from other regions, such as South America, Europe, etc.
However, it is still different, sometimes very different in details and implementation. And the difference needs time and efforts to eliminate.
I have been involved with the community for many years... and therefore I do not completely agree with your statement: "there are not enough open source projects and contributors in China". We have them, and they generally contribute directly to the projects involved (as it should be as you do not want to create islands/insular projects). Local (and localized) initiatives are great and I hope this is what you meant.
The open sources community in China is still small and lack solid industry support. We should build a bigger community and let more people have the ability and will to contribute.
Imagine Github offers a way for organizaitons to publish news! So instead of me going to blog.mozilla.org or blog.github.com to find out what's going on, I can just subscribe to an organization, get a newsfeed of their latest releases and announcement, and highlight commits (ex: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/59) !
I don't have time to implement this as an idea, but I think Github has that resource to implement it.
The use of highly cluttered web designs is also a distinctly East Asian phenomenon, but I'm not sure what the cultural explanation for that would be. It's especially odd to see it in Japan, where a more sparse aesthetic dominated the traditional culture.
I'm not 100% sure either, but the explanation given in http://www.tofugu.com/2012/05/15/japanese-web-design-why-you... seems not too far off.
The bias is quite evident in that article: "One culture's clutter is another culture's useful information." Being from the East myself, I've always found the increasingly "information-averse" nature of the West to be a little odd.
Short version, in a 'high context culture', things can be left unsaid and the cultural background will explain effectively to people within that culture (and less effectively to people outside that culture).
A Texan (the American south is high context) can say quite a bit with 'yep...' and letting the culture explain the rest of the meaning.
In a low context culture, less emphasis is placed on single word choices (though they can still be important) and more explanation of the entire context of the communication is done.
:+1: for follow an organization
Not "legally/officially open source" at least, but for some other definitions of "open", the culture is definitely there. :-)