The fact that Vue.js is popular and widely used is pretty known. However, another fact might be a surprise for you – Vue.js is absolutely crushing in China compared to other countries. What do I mean by this? The term “Vue.js” and the material related to is much more searched in China when comparing to the other countries. It means that the term is searched by a higher percentage of people in China than in any other country. However, that’s only one fact that might not indicate popularity. So let’s see if it is true that the Vue is popular in China or it is just useless numbers.
Is Vue more popular than React or Angular in China?
The fact that Vue.js is so popular in China, doesn’t mean that the other two frameworks are not. Not only the Vue but also other frameworks are used by the developers across China. For example, the React is used by enterprises in China.
However, if in the other parts of the world, React is still dominating, in China the difference is not that big. And it didn’t happen overnight – a few years ago the Vue was also popular as much as React in China.
What we can see from the Google trends, is that China is in the first place of the Google trends interest by region. The data for the last 5 years was taken in this case. So it is obvious Vue.js is pretty popular in China.
However, don’t think this number big because there are many people in China. The score isn’t calculated by the total number of queries. It’s a proportion of all the queries. This is what Google says about the calculation:
Reasons why Vue.js is trending in China
We could speculate that it’s because of the technical features of Vue, the ease of use, and progressivity of the framework, but sadly the technical features usually don’t have much to do with the popularity. There might be the best framework in the world, but the framework that is less superior and is backed up by a big company might be more popular.
So I can find two big reasons that might be related to Vue popularity in China.
Reason No. 1
The creator of the framework, Evan You, is a Chinese American. He was born in China, went to high school there, and after this, he went to the US for college. While being Chinese, Evan has ties with the Chinese developers’ community and receives support from them. He is also supportive of the community. That might be one of the reasons why Vue.js is popular in China – that’s because local developers are aware of the framework, some of them might know who is the creator of it, so eventually, it leads to the wider usage of the framework.
Evan You had spoken about the Vue in many conferences, so the framework is pretty known in the country. And every time the new project starts, Vue is one of the options that might be used. China gives a priority to the products of their own (example – Facebook and Google are banned in China). So because the Vue creator is Chinese, Vue.js is a domestic product in some way.
I wonder how many people from China would come to my website organically if Google was not banned in China.
Reason No. 2
Vue is used by many Chinese giants. Some of the Chinese companies that are using Vue.js for their projects:
As you might see there are some giants that are using Vue.js. And the fact that Alibaba is using Vue.js, is proof that the framework receives some spotlight in China. While the companies size like this is using the framework, it gives some stability to the technology. And of course, that’s proof that Vue is not an indie developers thing. More and more companies are choosing it instead of React or Angular. Another huge company, a Chinese unicorn – Xiaomi is using Vue.js. And of course, an also huge company, Bilibili, is using a Vue for their video, Youtube like, platform.
Why there are so many Chinese Vue.js libraries?
The answer to this is obvious, there are so many of them because Vue.js is pretty popular in China. And in case you were wondering if it safe to use these Chinese Vue libraries, the answer is yes, however, the biggest problem will be the documentation. Most of the time the English documentation is poor, so unless you know the Chinese language, you might struggle to understand it.
Native Chinese programmer here and things in this post are quite true and inspiring.
However, there are more quality tutorials abroad. What I’m doing is searching for them and making translations and Chinese dubs and publishing them in China. Before doing that, I have to get permission from the original authors. Recently I’m searching for quality Vue tutorials and to prove to the authors that Vue has great potential in China, I dropped into this post and found it valuable.
If you or anyone have trouble reading Chinese docs, I’m glad to help. And I’m glad to see anyone who could permit me to translate, make Chinese dubs, and publish his or her quality videos (not only Vue tutorial).
BTW, The Great Firewall which bans Google, YouTube, and Facebook is for defensive use and not that rigid but with a threshold. About 25 million Chinese (2.5% netizens) could visit websites globally as you may find many Simplified Chinese YouTube channels.