It's a version of Ubuntu so it's hardly "home grown".

a poor choice of headline by bbc - especially given that the ubuntu developer is a british company.

I it have a built-in (Great) firewall? :)

Maybe it's a language problem? In the "one people divided by a common language" sense. It isn't all that long since "native" (without further geographic information) meant "non-European" and "this part of the world" meant "this district of England". We won't talk about the Chunnel and the British mainland. Possibly "home-grown" means something different to the BBC.

What they mean is that at least some of the customisation is being done in China: the rest of the article says its a collaboration between Canonical and Chinese organisations.

I doubt the journalists understand the difference between an OS, a distro and a variant (respin/remix) of a distro.