> carries the __western__ values…China would never want a shiny model

Maybe, but that’s an opinion on what you think might happen. So far that has not been the case.

But yeah currently you can ask their models exactly the same controversial question (from the CCP perspective) in Chinese and the answer would be very different than the one in English.

> And since high quality content is suppressed, there is likely less high quality training sets

For now it seems that the Chinese labs are more interested in maximizing the quality and competitiveness of their models instead of lobotomizing them to enforce compliance with some sort of political agenda.

That might change of Chinese models might surpass Western ones in the future. Which is why competition is necessary to discourage them from doing thay.

> It's unlikely for both the hardware and the software of a Chinese GPU to deliver what's boasted in its marketing material.

Not currently sure. Chinese cars were pretty crap as well a few decades ago (and same applies to countless other example) so there is at least sufficient precedent to believe that China might close this gap eventually (and they clearly have been over the recent years when it comes to GPUs)