NOTE: referring to text models
As such, China launched DeepSeek R1, and they kind of broke the web, because it was pretty good compared with OpenAI, but also fully self-hostable. The self-hostable OpenAI and Meta models just aren't very good, Grok has nothing self-hostable, and I think Gemini only has a small model released.
Meanwhile China has the best self-hostable models, up there with Mistral.
So yes, Chinese AI is SOTA. Maybe not better than the American cloud-based models, but definitely SOTA for self-hostable ones.
Also I think you are wrong about "actual practice". Chinese AIs work great. They are not perfect, but OpenAI Codex also messes up a lot.
Kimi-K2.5 is probably the top text model for writing and any form of artistic or creative pursuit, and its "Deep Research" mode is better than GPT-5.2's. I use it alongside Opus 4.6, and I don't feel that one is "worse" than the other; they have different strengths.