ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 and Alibaba's Qwen-3.5 highlight China's AI push heading into 2026

Over the weekend, ByteDance rolled out its Seedance 2.0 video-generation tool to limited users on the Jimeng AI platform, triggering sharp gains of up to 20% for related Chinese media stocks. Alibaba Cloud developers also filed pull requests for the new multimodal Qwen-3.5 open-model family, featuring 9 billion and 35 billion parameter versions. Together these launches underscore intensifying competition among Chinese tech firms to release advanced AI products before the 2026 Lunar New Year.