In fairness this doesn't warrant the way that the policy targets Chinese models specifically, but Chinese providers do fall under the broader category of entities that cannot be prosecuted by the U.S. law if such behaviour is found.

Yeah, it's trivially easy to rip the alignment out of the model, but that's only because it's tacked on as an afterthought. If they implemented their censoring as part of training, instead of inferencing, it would be extremely difficult to eliminate.

Alignment isn't only used for censoring, and it doesn't have to be transparent. Considering how heavy of a hand most governments put into companies developing frontier models, it's reasonable to assume they will start restricting capabilities, e.g. there may be a domestic version of Llama and an ITAR-compliant Llama, and China will likely do the same with Qwen, Deepseek, and the like.