How much would it cost (time and resources) to take a Chinese open-weight model and remove these (admittedly) stupid guardrails?

You can find on Huggingface a huge number of Chinese open weights LLMs from which the censorship has been removed.

They typically contain in their names words like -abliterated or -uncensored.

For some of the recent bigger Chinese LLMs, it took a longer time until someone succeeded to remove the censorship, but eventually uncensored variants were published.

E.g. for Kimi 2.6 an uncensored variant appeared only a couple weeks ago.