China’s Fire Horse Is Grazing on US Pasture Land

March 2, 2026

China wants to regain the title of “the sleeping dragon” it had the beginning of the twenty-first century. At the dawn of the new millennium, China was projected to outpace the United States as the global economic leader. The Middle Kingdom was dubbed “the sleeping dragon” because it was a powerful beast waiting to dominate the world. It didn’t happen. Why?

There are so many reasons: communism, one child policy, authoritarian, average intelligence population, and more. That might change, however, because China is geared towards truly becoming the sleeping dragon with advanced technology. SCMP wrote about one of China’s endeavors to be at the top: “Alibaba Unveils Qwen-3.5, Sharpening Global Race To Spread AI Models.”

Alibaba is China’s answer to Amazon and it has its own version of AWS and AI. Dubbed Qwen, 3.5 he latest model of Alibaba’s AI and its posed to ignite a cold chip war between the US and China. Here’s what Qwen 3.5 can do:

“The new Qwen-3.5-Open-Source model with 397 billion parameters showed significant improvement over the company’s previous flagship model, Qwen-3-Max-Thinking, despite the latter’s much larger size of over 1 trillion parameters, according to self-reported benchmark scores. The model also boasted a performance on par with leading models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind, the benchmarks showed, although the comparison was not with the three US heavyweights’ latest models. Meanwhile, a closed-source version called Qwen-3.5-Plus achieved performance “on par with state-of-the-art leading models” and has a listed context window – the amount of data it can process at any given time – of 1 million tokens, one of the largest in the industry.”

China is embracing an open source approach to AI compared to the close model favored by the US Silicon Valley. Because Qwen 3.5 is the defacto open source model, the Trump administration has steered the US towards investing in open source AI.

I hear those teeth grinding. Can you?

Whitney Grace, March 2, 2026

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, Business strategy, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.