The consequences of locking intelligence away: an introduction to Claude relays in China

There has been recent discourse floating around on Hacker News about Chinese API relay stations that use every Western VC-subsidized channel of cheap tokens (think Claude/ChatGPT subscriptions, AWS/Azure credits, Kiro, Google Antigravity, etc.) to resell as APIs to the domestic Chinese market. This is true, as a Chinese citizen that has been seeing an uptick of this trend since mid 2024, but especially since 2025. When I go on Taobao (China's Amazon) and search for keywords, there would be dozen...