Open-source software transcends national boundaries, enabling collaboration among developers in universities, companies, and governments worldwide and contributes significantly to global economic activity. However, governments are increasingly exerting regulatory control over this global public good. In this paper, we examine the impact of one of these efforts – censorship on Gitee, a China-based code collaboration platform intended as an alternative of the U.S.-based GitHub. Using data on millions of commits to public projects on Gitee, we analyze developers’ responses to a major censorship event in 2022 that drew significant attention from the open-source community. Our findings reveal that censorship led to a steep decline in commits and interest in Gitee. However, this decline did not result in a substantial shift to GitHub, likely due to concurrent frictions on GitHub imposed by China’s Great Firewall. These results highlight the tension between government control and the open-source ethos and suggest the complex effects of regulation on platform competition and participation in open source.