The reasons behind the Chinese models’ refusals to talk about politically sensitive topics and western models’ “alignment” are different.

For China, the political restrictions are applied at the presentation/UI layer only to comply with the law. I’m pretty sure there is no law that restricts releasing open models that are capable of producing “wrongthink” output (in this case, an RNG would technically also be off limits since it could produce the wrong output given enough time). This can be effectively implemented by a “neutral” model with a smaller, “review” model being used to censor replies rather than “aligning” the initial model itself to be politically correct.

In contrast, Western labs’ “alignment” strategy is a PR move, meaning they want the refusals to be loud and clear (as opposed to being merely an inconvenient law they have to comply with), to support the idea that their models are so powerful and would mean doom if they weren’t “aligned”.