Just want to chime in on indie open source: I'm seeing many projects from chinese coders on Github since ~2022, I've come across some useful tools, mostly in the LLM space like OpenManus or Cherry Studio, but also documents like Siyuan, Univer. They seem pretty popular, even though many insist on inflating the stars at the beginning, for the initial boost on popularity.

Then there are the corporate-backed efforts from Bytedance, Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei which are sometimes published here and make the news, several frameworks and engines.

Some projects only have a read-only mirror on Github, because all the work is done on their local alternatives like Gitee, or scattered around other places.

And well, anywhere you go a lot of software is disposable; integrations, widgets, things tailored to the local market, and so on... so that's probably why we don't see as much. I mean, it pales in comparison to the amount of culturally impactful software made back in the 80s and 90s, both in Europe and the US. But all things considered, I think they are catching up, and the traditional language barrier is breaking down, as in, I'm seeing more collaboration out in the open.

I doubt China has 7m persons writing code in the same way that I doubt there are 1.6m people pumping code in the US. That being said, they are pretty close to being in a "closed universe" of their own. Some companies are trying to open up (deepseek, tencent, alibaba, etc...) but it is a relatively a new thing.

If you go low in the stack (Operating Systems, compilers, developer tools, etc...) it's all American but in mainland China they make everything custom and different (more aligned with their culture and how they do business).

If you want to get in touch with them, find projects in GitHub where the Chinese hangs out (ie: they like P2P/sharing/decentralized stuff) and send an email. My experience is that they are eager to try your stuff or get in touch but there can be a significant language barrier.

We in exUSSR asked similar question - we have huge number of engineers, but don't see huge industrial export, only agricultural now.

Answer found in economy works of Adam Smith and modern - Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson.

Answer is simple and named information inequality.

What it mean - professional know magnitudes more than customer, and customer just don't know 99% of what exist on market, or even more.

To solve problem of information inequality appear middleman, usually in form of entrepreneur, who know customer needs and know what could do professionals, and invest in products (or in services).

Problem is that entrepreneur must have computer education, and at same time be old enough to talk with all people.

In China was so pure people before 2000s, they just don't know computers at all. After middle 2000s China become much richer, they even got about 60 millions more or less similar to middle class of Europe, from which about 7m programmers.

What all these means? Few things.

First - Chinese programmers are now busy in just filling emptiness, as they are culturally so different from West, that many Western soft is not fit, so Chinese programmers need to make their local clones, and they now repeat steps, Western programmers made in 1950s..2000s, so 50 years. Oh, sorry, really computer revolution at West happen in late 1970s, with microcomputers, but anyway, at West we have programmers nearly all ages from school to about 80years old (2020-1980+30..40), but in China, most just about 40 years at most (2020-2005+20).

Second - Chinese programmers don't have enough entrepreneurs, so they cannot got contact with clients, this is like huge concrete wall.

Third, really First - Chinese population older than about 40 years, just don't have any feelings to computers. Believe me, I know lot of people for which virtual world is just don't exists, so Chinese programmers just don't have any feedback from their population, and so they cannot use their home country as foundation to grow. This is so serious obstacle, which just made literally impossible creation of something really interesting but not tied to huge corporation, and China don't have startup ecosystem, because it need decades to grow.

So from all these points for me obvious, we could only see from China only big corporation products with Chinese specifics, and all known examples show this: few games, clone of internet search engine, clone of linux and lot of nearly unknown embedded software in Chinese products.

In about 20 years things could change, if China will open culturally to West, but now they filling gap.

For a starter many large Chinese software develop their own in-house tools, including chat, planning and office. It is usually a complete suite so that everything interacts with everything else pretty well. For example you can directly open a file shared by someone else in a chat in office locally -- this was my experience in Tiktok.

And you probably already know Wechat and QQ.

And since China provides a lot of embedded devices to the world, there is a big chance that your doorbell or cleaning robot uses code written by a Chinese company.

Given the GFW and walls placed against foreign companies operating in China, there's a good chance that a lot of developers in China are more or less duplicating the work of what western firms do but highly localized for the Chinese domestic market. Pretty much impossible to know either.

I suspect most of it stays in China just as most software in the US probably stays in the US…defense, public sector, websites, banking, small and medium business, enterprises headquartered in the US, etc.

Scott Hanselman used to call this “dark matter programming” and maybe still does.

They are used in China...And many games are famous in China, but it's unknown in the US...I think many countries have their own software to use , not just use the product made in the US.

Like into Huawei cell towers, $9 doorbell camera firmwares, all sorts of cheap/outsourced proprietary codes, and Chinese webapps?

there's a chinese version of every popular website you know. sometimes multiple

Try disk partitioning software: AOMEI, Macrorit, Easeus, NIUBI, IM-Magic/RESIZE-C (cant find where its from = China). Pretty much every single one calls home. Most look like fronts for money laundering or clandestine agencies :)

Edit Afaik only MiniTool and LSoft are not Chinese from the mayor partitioning/recovery vendors, instead both are Canadian.

> 7m people presumably many of them on 996 schedule must be producing a sizable LoC output...where is it going?

Malware. I’m barely exaggerating, look up what popular apps like Tik Tok and DJI do to obfuscate their runtime. Also, Black Myth Wukong runs on UE5 so it’s mostly American-made code. I still wouldn’t want to run it on any devices I own though.