I wonder what are the economics driving these pricing decisions? Are the Chinese companies just subsidizing their models to a greater degree than the US, or is this an emergent property of energy policy between countries?
Throwing out another factor: Chinese companies have been banned and/or limited from buying nvidia, and turned to local companies for their hardware. I haven't actually seen pricing/benchmarks comparing Chinese AI accelerators, but it wouldn't surprise me if that also worked out in their favor as well.
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Lower cost of labor, lots of under the hood optimizations (e.g. cache hits for DS), many of these companies have existing infra (fewer upfront costs for deployment), etc
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Maybe not being led by a sociopath also helps.