Anthropic, OpenAI and Google have real user data that they can use to influence their models. Chinese labs have benchmarks. Once you realize this, it's obvious why this is the case.
You can have self-hosted models. You can have models that improve based on your needs. You can't have both.
zAI, minimax and Kimi have plenty of subscriber usage on their own platforms. They get real data just as well. Less or it maybe but it's there.
I'm going to claim that the majority of those users are optimizing for cost and not correctness and therefore the quality of data collected from those sessions is questionable. If you're working on something of consequence, you're not using those platforms. If you're a tinkerer pinching pennies, sure.
ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are banned in China. Chinese model providers are getting absolutely massive amounts of very valuable user feedback from users in China.
This is a weird dichotomy and I don't agree with it. You don't need to have bags of money to burn to work on serious things. You also can value correctness if you're poor.