But it’s the most useless canary ever. We already know that certain topics are taboo in China.
As for all the other uses the models have, it seems pretty clear they’re not doing anything weird. If they were, people would be posting examples of that and not of Tiananmen Square.
What it really helps with is "is this _provider_ likely Chinese?", as we've seen, many of the big Chinese models have no issue on their own discussing the taboo subjects. It's the higher level provider that is filtering output.
If you run the same query a bunch of times you'll see filtered responses mixed with model output where it says random stuff varying from 'nothing to see here' through 'The government of China cares deeply about its people...'
As for all the other uses the models have, it seems pretty clear they’re not doing anything weird. If they were, people would be posting examples of that and not of Tiananmen Square.