China is watching world sentiment shifting away from USA. Doing many small things that show both strength and openness is surely very intentional.
It's Linux on the desktop all over again. Next year will be its time.
But yes, as a European, the US hasn't exactly been making friends over here.
It does not have to beat US firms, it just needs to be cheaper.
I use Deepseek v4 flash for a lot of reviewing and summarizing tasks, only used 4$ in the last two months. No dramatic drop in performance against other US models, it works for my use case. I do use GPT 5.6 Sol for other things but tried GLM 5.2 and it was good enough.