China doesn't want to miss the boat on any new innovation, and their investment approach is to invest in literally everything, to maximize the likelihood of backing a winner. Tencent bought 5% of Tesla just months ago.
And maybe, just maybe, this is connected to:
https://jalopnik.com/china-forces-all-cars-in-restive-region...
and to the concept that an autonomous vehicle can be used as a weapon and as such it needs to eb controlled/controllable by a "local" trusted company:
https://www.ft.com/content/a8dbd4e0-f807-11e7-88f7-5465a6ce1...
But there is a force in the other direction: each investment can only bear so much new capital without losing marginal value. So after a while you have to start to look for new investments to spread your capital around.
There is probably a ton of money behind these chinese investments, and a relatively small total market for venture capital, so they end up making a lot of investments.
Spreading a small amount of money across a large number of investments within a sector usually works out pretty well, though. This is a diversified portfolio, and basically it means you're betting that someone in the sector will succeed without taking a position on who that will be. If you know that the market exists and the technology is attainable, it makes a lot of sense.