The success of Sensetime and Alibaba's (affiliate of Sesame Credit) large investments truly lead me to believe this is a big step towards enforcing the physical aspect of the Social Credit Score, so its not surprising that the government would be all in for helping them along.
My question to your question is, what exactly are we trying to compete towards? I keep reading article after article how China is beating us in AI, but they never explain what that means for us everyday citizens, except for what I can see happening to China. From my perspective, this seems like a frantic push towards omniscient presence in the every day lives of their citizens, which for me completely wipes out any honest benefit AI could provide.