I wouldn’t be surprised. The CCP is keen on building a ChatGPT style LLM on its own. Their traditional SNS is WeChat, which was a WhatsApp alternative, and thus was not as powerful as Reddit.
They are investing in Reddit alternatives I read, and they want these SNSes to be pro-CCP because that’s how they’d enforce their LLM to be pro-CCP. .ml and the Lemmy code project itself would be a perfect example.