what are the best peforming chinese LLM models from a performance and price perspective?

Several Chinese LLMs currently offer high performance at competitive price points, challenging Western proprietary models. Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2-Pro is a notable performer, offering frontier-adjacent capabilities, a 1-million-token context window, and significantly lower costs than leading Western alternatives [2, 8, 12]. Similarly, Alibaba’s Qwen 3.5 Plus, a 397-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model, benchmarks comparably to GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro, with pricing ranging from $1.20 to $7.20 per million tokens [10]. For those seeking open-source options, Z.ai’s GLM-5 provides roughly 80-90% of frontier-model performance at a price of $1 per million input tokens [4, 5, 9]. Additionally, DeepSeek has gained recognition as a "cost-killer" in the industry, having developed its R1 model at a fraction of the cost of Western peers [11]. Overall, Chinese labs are increasingly releasing models under $1 per million input tokens, with some claiming costs as low as 1/10th of Western equivalents [3].