I read somewhere that Chinese SOTA work better in chinese, and worse for English or other languages.

I rarely use any other languages but English for LLM tasks for reasons of sharing across the world.

Maybe that explains Chinese models been subpar for me. Don't tell me the bench marks here are based on Chinese languages only.

Unless I see the diff, I won't use more Chinese models be it cheaper or faster since I can't get the same perf/intelligence with English.

I've consistently heard the opposite from Chinese programmers. Maybe the performance is better in some tasks or maybe the sample size of San Francisco is just skewed.