The "bad" news is that so far I've yet to see a serious contender emerging from that part of the world (although the Middle East has invested heavily in LLMs due to obvious cultural differences).
"To be clear, the goal here is not to deny China or any other authoritarian country the immense benefits in science, medicine, quality of life, etc. that come from very powerful AI systems. Everyone should be able to benefit from AI. The goal is to prevent them from gaining military dominance."
Navigating a world in transition: Dario Amodei in conversation with Zanny Minton Beddoes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvMolVW_2v0
You can tell as an academic he wants to give DeepSeek props, at least that is what I would like to believe. The first third has the presenter leaning into "cheap chinese" too many times.