China Accelerates Phase-Out of Windows 10 Government Edition

China’s sudden switch echoes France’s 2013 post-Snowden push to purge foreign clouds and the Soviet Union’s 1970s move to develop EC-series IBM clones—each a bid for technological self-reliance when geopolitical tensions spiked. This edict sits inside a decade-long Chinese project—begun with the 2023 “safe & reliable” procurement rules—to build a fully indigenous tech stack from chips (Huawei’s Kirin, Loongson) to OS (Kylin, HarmonyOS). The immediate impact is modest—only a niche Windows fork disappears—but on a 100-year arc it signals the entrenchment of a bifurcated digital sphere where major powers no longer trust code they do not control, with cascading effects on supply chains, standards, and ultimately on who writes the software that underpins state power.