I think GitHub gets used there as a social network because it isn't fully censored. I've read about Chinese using it to share/collaborate on unsanctioned information because it can't just be blocked: unlike Facebook and Twitter, it's too important to their software industry.

Trivia: This effect is called colleteral freedom

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_freedom

This is true, but only as far as people can keep their Github accounts anonymous. A couple months ago the government tracked down three people who had been using Github to share censored content and arrested them[1]. A whole bunch of other repos shut down quick smart after that for fear of more arrests. We can only hope some people outside the country made local clones.

[1] https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/27/china-free-covid-19-acti...

I have used Ant Design and I've never used bootstrap. I found Ant well made and well designed. It used to suffer from a lack of English documentation but that has since been fixed. It is quite beautiful.

>a Chinese company called Ant Financial

Ant Financial is under Alibaba. So yes it is pretty big.

Ant-design is nice, but I refuse to use it because I do not want to support Ant Financial and its CCP affiliated companies.

Last time I tried out Ant Design (about two years ago) I also tried out BizCharts, alibabas library for plotting charts. However, I noticed that it was making requests to kcart.alipay.com servers whenever it was loaded in some weird obfuscated code. Long story short, there was a microscopically tiny mention of it on the Docs in the Mandarin only section. Thus, whilst not the exact same repo, it was part of the same ecosystem of libraries and I have not touched one of them since. Does anyone know if they've made the 'anonymous telemetry' opt-in now?

Similarly, but more innocuously, there was an incident where they silently pushed code with a Christmas “easter egg” that added snow to buttons.

[0] https://blog.shunliang.io/frontend/2018/12/25/the-ant-design...