China's Genius Plan to Win the AI Race Is Paying Off

Summary

The Financial Times reports that China's strategic approach to the AI race — emphasizing open-source model releases, large-scale domestic compute buildout, and state-backed research coordination — is yielding competitive results. The piece points to a string of high-quality open-source releases from Chinese labs including Alibaba's Qwen series, DeepSeek's reasoning models, and ByteDance's video generation work as evidence that China's AI ecosystem has closed much of the capability gap with U.S.