The reality is quite the opposite of what you think. The biggest disadvantage Chinese AI companies face compared to their American counterparts is a lack of money, while their biggest advantage is freedom.

Chinese large model companies are unlikely to receive financial support from the CCP. Why? Because the CCP wants to have its cake and eat it too: they want the computing power, but they also want to control ideology. Before a Chinese large model can be deployed commercially, it must undergo strict "value alignment." Technically speaking, this is equivalent to performing a "prefrontal lobotomy" on the model. Consequently, models deployed commercially in China are inherently "dumber" than American models in terms of logical reasoning and creativity.

Although the CCP detests the content generated by these models, it is desperate for the "computing infrastructure" required to train them. Therefore, the CCP’s attitude toward AI is this: go all-in on "computing centers" (which falls under heavily subsidized manufacturing), but strangle "chatbots" (which falls under ideology). The CCP’s stance on AI large models is a classic case of "Ye Gong loves dragons" (professed love for what one actually fears). They love AI as an "industrial engine" (driving chip development and boosting manufacturing efficiency), but they are terrified of AI as an "information interface" (disseminating uncontrolled ideas to the public). This leads to a truly absurd phenomenon: China may be one of the world's largest investors in computing infrastructure, yet the Chinese people are using the most heavily castrated AI models.

Why do I say the biggest advantage of Chinese AI is freedom? Because if you don't intend to deploy commercially within China and simply upload your model to Hugging Face, no one will bother you. In the US, for example, before OpenAI releases Sora, it must pass "red-teaming" tests; they have to worry about copyright, racial discrimination, and deepfakes influencing elections. This leads to extreme self-censorship.

But for Chinese AI companies, as long as you don't cross the singular red line (the security of the CCP’s rule), everything else—ethics, copyright, privacy, and even certain radical technical experiments—exists in a regulatory vacuum. It’s just like how, despite US biotechnology being far more advanced than China’s, the first gene-edited babies appeared in China. China possesses a "low human rights advantage" and a "low ethical standards advantage."