It's probably much more true for strategically important companies than for your average Chinese person that they are in some way controlled by the Party.
There was recently an article about the "China 2025" initiative on this here orange website. One of its focus areas is AI.
Which is why we started to have weird national-lab-alike organizations in China releasing models, for example InternLM [0] and BAAI [1]. CCP won't outsource its focus areas to the private sector. Are they competent? I don't know, certainly less than QWen and DeepSeek for now.
