I think self-hosting Chinese models is so popular precisely because China is so authoritarian.

If China wants to sell Solar panels to Americans, they can just sell solar panels, the sun won't mind. If China wants to sell models to Americans... well, Americans don't want to send their data to China, so they can't just offer them as SaaS. They don't want to be left behind in the AI race either. The only option to capture western mindshare is to do what they've always done, use Chinese taxpayers' money to subsidize model development, make American labs uncompetitive, make them go bankrupt, then have control over the entire sector.

Some US labs may become uncompetitive if they have the wrong business strategy, that doesn't mean every AI company will be. If one part of the stack gets commoditized, build your moat elsewhere.

I am not sure the comparison is exactly fitting... Specifically, solar panels in wholesale quantities have to come in 40' or 45' cargo containers by ocean from China and can be easily tariffed or blocked at the ports.

Releasing the weights of a software project on modelscope and huggingface and similar (and I'm sure they'd find a new way to distribute it for an English language audience if huggingface vanished tomorrow as well) is totally different, because there's no tangible hardware product involved.