China Gave Its AI Away

China's 15th Five-Year Plan reveals a deliberate bet on small, open, and efficient AI models over the West's expensive proprietary giants. DeepSeek trained a GPT-4 rival for $6 million and released it free. Alibaba's Qwen hit 700 million downloads. Chinese models now account for nearly 30 percent of global AI usage. The strategy is not about beating the West on benchmarks. It is about becoming the default AI infrastructure for the rest of the world, and it is already working.