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Censorship in China
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Gitee, China’s answer to GitHub, to review all code by temporarily closing open-source projects to the public

  • China’s largest open-source code platform will temporarily close public repositories to review their contents before opening them up again
  • The policy change, for which no reason was given, comes as Beijing tightens its grip on internet content

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Open-source code repositories have become an essential way for developers to quickly collaborate on projects but China’s largest platform for such code will not manually review all repositories, angering programmers. Photo: Shutterstock
Coco Feng

Gitee, China’s answer to open-source platform GitHub, said it will temporarily close public code repositories so they can be reviewed before they are made available to the community again, which comes amid tightening online censorship in the country.

“All new open-source repositories shall be manually reviewed before they are officially made public,” Gitee said in a statement on Zhihu, a Quora-like question-and-answer platform. “For those already opened, we’ll temporarily make them private and make them public again after review.”

The platform did not specify any reasons for the policy change, but said it was “forced out of necessity”. The platform aims to “increase technical and human inputs for review, speed up progress and try to ensure every developer’s [positive] experience”.

Gitee, which was started by Shenzhen-based Open Source China in 2013, is the country’s dominant platform for hosting open-source code using git or Apache Subversion, software that helps coders collaborate and track changes. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology picked it as one of the country’s “trustees” of open-source code. The platform is used by 8 million programmers and hosts more than 20 million projects, according to Gitee’s website.

That pales in comparison to the more than 83 million users and 200 million projects on GitHub, the world’s dominant open-source code platform founded in 2008 and acquired by Microsoft a decade later. However, access to that site has been volatile for years, as it became host to code for censorship circumvention tools like virtual private networks.

Authorities temporarily blocked GitHub in 2013 before anger from programmers led to a rare reversal. Censors’ reluctance to completely block the platform has since led people to use it as a “free speech zone” to post politically sensitive content on topics ranging from labour rights to Covid-19.

Gitee hosts many repositories cloned from GitHub, a common practice in the open-source community.

Gitee is China’s largest platform for hosting open-source code, but usage remains far behind that of its more international peer GitHub. Photo: Captured from Gitee
Gitee is China’s largest platform for hosting open-source code, but usage remains far behind that of its more international peer GitHub. Photo: Captured from Gitee
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