> The current leadership actively destroys history to suit their new narratives including razing of ancient history to help the young forget.
I'm not sure how you came to this conclusion, are you referring to culture revolution? That's about 50 years ago , and things are different now. Actually the government is inclined to bury those periods of story, and promoting more tradition and ancient history.
Using technology/standard/service provided by US based private companies introduce risks. We are not just 'use/steal' these technologies/standard, we also heavily invest, enrich ecosystem, build services on top of them, that means if US government kill it at any time, those investments may lost too.
Based on my experience, Chinese government is so incompetent that it can't create an alternative, or initiate one, at least in the Internet industry, also China have to do business with other countries(other than US), so clearly create a private tech/standard stack is not an option. That means big companies like Huawei/Tencent/Alibaba/Baidu will start/continue to support&invest more in true open technologies, like linux/risk-v, perhaps favor true oss communities rather than google/fb owned oss projects(like android/arm/tensorflow).
Companies in countries other than China and US should also think about this risk, today US is banning Huawei, you may think it's all because China is evil, similar things happened for Japan 2 decades ago, and may still possible for India(if its population and GDP growth rate continues).
Chinese dev here, currently at xiaomi, worked for VMware and Baidu
> What are dev practises like - do people do Agile / Scrum?
Not full/standard practice I think, normally just standup meeting I guess.., when I was in VMware China, some projects used scrum.
> Is "post-agile" (sorry) scepticism a thing?
No
> What about TDD and CI/CD?
I'd say TDD and CI are common.
> How about technologies, do people develop on Linux, are they using git,
Yes, all the time.
> are american libraries/frameworks big - are people using React etc?
Yes
> How about things like FP and niche languages - is there much appetite for people experimenting with new tech/languages or are Python/Java the defacto choices for application work and everything else shunned?
Yes, go/rust is gaining popularity.
> Is there a Chinese-equivalent to GitHub - is engineering in China big enough that they can have their own independent OSS culture? (Is companies contributing back to OSS a thing?)
No, there are some github like services, e.g. gitee.com, but the scale and user base is not at same scale.
> are developers seen as feature-factories or is the relationship between product and developers/tech more flat/harmonious than that?
There are lots of jokes about product&developer here in China, so you can imagine.