There is no evidence Chinese providers are getting such subsidised, and in fact apparently Jinping (who presumably knows what the CPP is doing) was surprised when DeepSeek and Qwen generated so much buzz. In China, AI inference is just viewed as another basic utility, much like an e-mail provider or a mobile phone network.

I'm not aware of how Musk/SpaceX are "raiding retirement funds"?

The truly cheap Chinese models are usually the open weights ones so while there may be a training subsidy, the inference prices reflect real costs.