[jpeeler]

My perspective on what might contribute to this (perceived?) lack of open source contribution coming from China may partially be our (the US') fault. Everyone knows that open source has mostly shifted to being commercialized on the whole and therefore most of the development is done from 9-5. There is literally no intersection of normal business hours between the US and China, so synchronous communication is severely impeded. Obviously, many open source projects are excellent at working completely asynchronously. However, many are not and I think the commercialization trend of recent years has made it even more so a rarity. I've personally seen an uptake in video chat meetings that are sometimes not even recorded, so it's difficult for non-attendees to follow the project. One of the fantastic things I saw in the OpenStack community was a very intentional effort to schedule alternating meeting times to maximize time zone coverage of waking hours. (It was also in text, which made it easily archivable, searchable, and available to people with minimal bandwidth.)

I realize of course that open source development occurs outside of the US and I may be inflating my country's importance in the whole matter. Would love to hear from some non-US open source devs how their contribution experience with people from China compares.