All the Chinese programmers I know can understand some English - especially enough to write code, though many have taken English classes as well. It's possible my selection sample is biased, since the Chinese programmers I know are somehow related to this industry.<p>FYI: they use keyboards that have both Chinese and English characters on them, like:
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#Chinese" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#Chinese</a>
I doubt it would be that hard. You'd just have to memorize the keywords in the programming language. You don't need to speak English to write code, although it does help.
I would presume they use a keyboard.<p>On a more serious note, as a native Finnish-speaker, I've always written all of my code and comments in English. It's just so much simpler than any other alternative I can think of.
If you don't know any English then you don't code. How could you?? Every programmer I know does know some English and can write/speak well enough to be understood.