THE ECONOMIST: Why China is giving away its technology for free

Underpinning the digital economy is a deep foundation of open-source software, freely available for anyone to use. The majority of the world’s websites are run using Apache and Nginx, two open-source programs.

Most computer servers are powered by Linux, another such programme, which is also the basis of Google’s Android operating system. Kubernetes, a programme widely used to manage cloud-computing workloads, is likewise open-source. The software is maintained and improved upon by a global community of developers.

China, which had long stood at the periphery of that community, has in recent years become an integral part of it. After America and India, it is home to the largest group of developers on GitHub, the world’s biggest repository of open-source software.

Chinese tech giants, including Alibaba, Baidu and Huawei, have become prolific open-source funders and contributors.

China has been particularly active in the development of open-source artificial-intelligence (AI) models, including those from DeepSeek, an AI startup that shook the world in January by releasing for free the cutting-edge models it had developed on a shoestring. According to Artificial Analysis, a website, 12 of the 15 leading open-source AI models are Chinese.

This newfound interest in open-source has been fueled by America’s efforts to hobble its rival. Curbing China’s access to code that is readily available online is tricky.

This month Ren Zhengfei, Huawei’s founder, told People’s Daily, a Communist Party mouthpiece, that American tech restrictions were nothing to fear since “there will be thousands of open-source software (programs) to meet the needs of the entire society”.

Yet the rise in China of open technology, which relies on transparency and decentralisation, is awkward for an authoritarian state.

If the party’s patience with open-source fades, and it decides to exert control, that could hinder both the course of innovation at home and developers’ ability to export their technology abroad.

China’s open-source movement first gained traction in the mid-2010s. Richard Lin, co-founder of Kaiyuanshe, a local open-source advocacy group, recalls that most of the early adopters were developers who simply wanted free software.

That changed when they realised that contributing to open-source projects could improve their job prospects.

Big firms soon followed, with companies like Huawei backing open-source work to attract talent and cut costs by sharing technology.

Momentum gathered in 2019 when Huawei was, in effect, barred by America from using Android. That gave new urgency to efforts to cut reliance on Western technology. Open-source offered a faster way for Chinese tech firms to take existing code and build their own programs with help from the country’s vast community of developers.

In 2020, Huawei launched OpenHarmony, a family of open-source operating systems for smartphones and other devices. It also joined others, including Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, to establish the OpenAtom Foundation, a body dedicated to open-source development.

China quickly became not just a big contributor to open-source programs, but also an early adopter of software. JD.com, an e-commerce firm, was among the first to deploy Kubernetes.

AI has lately given China’s open-source movement a further boost. Chinese companies and the government see open models as the quickest way to narrow the gap with America. DeepSeek’s models have generated the most interest, but Qwen, developed by Alibaba, is also highly rated, and Baidu has said it will soon open up the model behind its Ernie chatbot.

China’s enthusiasm for open technology is also extending to hardware. Unitree, a robotics startup from Hangzhou, has made its training data, algorithms and hardware designs available for free, which may help it to shape global standards. Semiconductors offer another illustration.

China depends on designs from Western chip firms. As part of its push for self-sufficiency, the government is urging firms to adopt RISC-V, an open chip architecture developed at the University of California, Berkeley.

Many Chinese firms also hope that more transparent technology will help them win acceptance for their products abroad. That has yet to prove true. Huawei’s operating system has found few users elsewhere.

Although some Western companies have been experimenting with DeepSeek’s models, an executive at a global enterprise-software firm says that many clients outside China will not touch the country’s AI tools. Some fear disruption from future American restrictions. Others worry about backdoors hidden in the code that might allow them to be spied on.

China’s open-source ambitions could be derailed in other ways, too. Qi Ning, a Chinese software engineer, points out that at international open-source conferences, attendees increasingly avoid naming Chinese collaborators, as they worry about reputational risk or political blowback.

America’s government may also make life difficult for Chinese open-source developers. Fearing nefarious meddling in the world’s code, it could seek to cut China off from GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft.

Mr Qi says many Chinese developers fear “access issues in the future”.

China’s government has promoted Gitee, a domestic alternative. But few local programmers use it. Last year some American lawmakers argued for restricting China’s access to RISC-V — though Andrea Gallo, head of the Swiss body that oversees the technology, contends that this is not feasible as it is a public standard, much like USB.

Version control

Yet it is China’s own government that poses the biggest threat to the country’s open-source experiment, despite supporting it in principle. In 2021 the government restricted access to GitHub, concerned that the platform could be used to host politically sensitive content.

Developers quickly turned to virtual private networks (which mask a user’s location) to regain access, but the episode rattled many. In 2022 the government announced that all projects on Gitee would be subject to official review and that developers would need to certify compliance with Chinese law.

A similar pattern is playing out in AI. Chinese law prohibits models from generating content that “damages the unity of the country and social harmony”. In 2023 Hugging Face, a Franco-American platform for sharing open-source AI models, became inaccessible from within China.

China’s open-source movement is organic, driven by developers and tech firms. The government has so far encouraged it because it serves its objectives of accelerating domestic innovation and reducing reliance on Western technology. If China’s leaders constrain the culture of freedom and experimentation on which open technology relies, however, they will limit its potential.