Radiolab did a great episode that covered the history of Chinese character computing: https://radiolab.org/podcast/wubi-effect

To summarize, in the 70s and 80s, China was facing an existential threat with their inability to access an economic accelerator (widespread computing) in their native language.

To the extent that there was serious consideration at the highest levels of converting the entire country to an alphabet-based writing system.

I'd expect they're looking at AI the same way:

We have to have access to this. Most of the frontier labs are American (or European). Therefore we need a solution we have continued access to.

Open weights feels simultaneously Chinese in nature (progress through making a design copyable and improvable by a large number of people) and economic (providing an incentive for the world to use Chinese models over other frontier).