React is popular among English users. And it’s also popular in China. I’m going to talk about it. Probably I have talked on it before on Twitter or somewhere, this time is a little different. There are several day left before Dafeng take over the forum of http://react-china.org . I start that forum at about Oct 2014, 2 years ago, after talking with xvfeng after attending his meetup in Shanghai. It’s a long journey.

In China, there are a lot of front-end developers. We have Alibaba with lots companies under the group, we also have Tencent, and a lot of internet companies that are not famous around the globe. Some of them are targeting the Chinese market, you will probably never know it. Some of them are open to share, some are not. China is big enough, with a lot of programmers. I’m currently working in Eleme, and my previous one is Teambiton, and the story began there.

Back in 2014 we were looking for a powerful tool to replace Backbone that was powering our apps. Some are trying Angular, Vue was new at the time, and lots of other libraries. I chose React because of the “uni-directional data flow” feature. But in China there was not many people working on this area. They were watching, and slowly trying privately. I have to find people use React by myself. I know they are there, but I don’t know them.

Before that, I have been an active member in Chinese Node.js community even though I don’t program web servers. I spent two years in the forum and I already familiar with situation.

In China, we don’t use IRCs often, and text messages, maybe, but not quite. Since we started learning to use computer, there was QQ from Tencent, then in 2010 we have Weibo from Sina, around 2014 I started picking up WeChat since people use it for contact during the meetups. These three apps are like Facebook and Twitter, a lot people are using them every day.

At first, I registered an standalone Weibo account called react-china to broadcast news on React. Long time after that, I noticed IFTTT can do that for me, so now all the messages are posted via IFTTT. And I talked about about React on Weibo and started to know people. Now we have 5k+ followers and 8k+ tweets there.