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What are the best Chinese models on HuggingFace today? Bucket by ideal RAM: <16GB, <32GB, <96, <256, 256+
Text generation, image generation, TTS, etc
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Alibaba Cloud runs ModelScope, which is like Hugging Face but based in China:
- Source code (ironically on GitHub): https://github.com/modelscope/modelscope
It's not limited to Alibaba's Qwen. All of the other major Chinese ones are on there (GLM, DeepSeek, Kimi, etc.) as well as finetunes and quantizations of the non-Chinese ones.
The two major image generation models are both by Alibaba - Z-Image and Qwen-Image-2512/Qwen-Edit-2511. They are both decent but have different use-cases. Unfortunately with the recent Qwen-Image 2 and now 3 it doesn't seem likely that they're going to be doing any more open-weight image gen.
https://huggingface.co/Tongyi-MAI/Z-Image-Turbo
My list would be to go grab GLM5.2, Deepseek v4 Flash and Pro, and the various sizes of Qwen 3.5/3.6 dense and MoE, along with at least one of the multi modal qwens (I think it’s called VL). In a pinch, you can quantize them yourself to whatever size you need.
Specific use case is way too important for a list like that to be very helpful. I only know image gen well enough to use as an example, but style, resolution, inpainting, img2img or text2image, lora compatibility, etc. all lead to different “best” models.
Even more complex for image2video, but there’s fewer models to choose from there at least.
Hugging Face recently added a filter directly on the models page: https://huggingface.co/models that lets you filter based on hardware.
It is a lost opportunity that huggingface (or unsloth) frontpage doesn't have a list like this that updates which each model release.
qwen3.6-27B, gemma4-it-31B, poolside/Laguna-S-2.1 are all good text gen models generally in the <128GB (depending on quant, you can fit them in smaller mem footprint)
Note, Laguna provided quants have some issues and they are reworking/updating them.
256+: GLM-5.2 (swap with Kimi K3 when it goes open-weight on Monday)
<256: Actually, surprisingly, not a Chinese model but probably Laguna S2.1. The best Chinese model at this size is DeepSeek V4 Flash though
<96: Qwen 3.6 27B
<32: Still Qwen 3.6 27B (NVFP4)
<16: Oof, not sure. Nothing will feel great at this size TBQH without finetuning on a specific task. Pick your poison of tiny Qwen or tiny Gemma (although again Gemma is not Chinese)