GitHub serves as a repository for collaborative work in software development, with numerous open-source projects available and worked on by numerous coders, would-be coders, and others. It has been a paragon for a more open internet, with more open standards, and allowing for actual community-based troubleshoot and development. And it does so for anyone around the world.

However, China's efforts to decouple from its dependencies on the Western world for anything technologically-related has been a reason for the country to invest not only on infrastructure and silicon manufacturing, but also in programming and all of the related branches of the technology tree. Recent events initiated by Microsoft (which now owns GitHub) via severing connections to its GitHub repositories for various US-sanctioned countries such as Iran, Syria and Crimea clearly showed what dependencies on foreign-guaranteed resources can do to technological development. China wants to have an answer to that.