Genuine question: how does downloading an open-weight model (Qwen in this case) and running it either locally or via a third-party service benefit China?
Yes, the censorship for some topics currently doesn't appear to be any good, but it does exist, will absolutely get better (both harder to subvert and more subtle), and makes the models less trustworthy than those from countries (US, EU, Sweden, whatever) that don't have that same level of state control. (note that I'm not claiming that there's no state control or picking any specific other country)
That's the downside to the user. To loop that back to your question, the upside to China is soft power (the same kind that the US has been flushing away recently). It's pretty similar to TikTok - if you have an extremely popular thing that people spend hours a day on and start to filter their life through, and you can influence it, that's a huge amount of power - even if you don't make any money off of it.
Now, to be fair to the context of your question, there isn't nearly as much soft power you can get from a model that people use primarily for coding - that I'm less concerned about.
[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/i-just-outsmarted-deepseeks-cen...
However, American models (just like Chinese models) are heavily censored according to the society. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, are all aggressively censored to meet western expectation.
So in essence, Chinese models should be less censored than western models for western topics.