The Dragon Moves Ahead
Complacency About “Chinese Junk” is Outdated Folly, But Trump’s War May Be Wicked, Rather Than Crazy.
While the Netanyahu/Trump Purim War was costing the USA up to $2 Billion every day in the early stages alone, several scarcely noticed announcements gave a glimpse of how China is pulling ahead in all sorts of crucial technological fields.
It has emerged that Chinese AI development startup MizarVision is capturing high-resolution satellite images of every US military base, every carrier strike group, every plane, every THAAD battery, and every Patriot missile position in the Middle East.
With AI-generated labels, geolocation, and annotations, the data is updated in almost real-time. One release alone catalogued approximately 2,500 individual US Army installations in the region. The images come mainly from the Jilin-1 network of over 100 commercial observation satellites.
The Chinese start-up has leapfrogged the billions spent by the Pentagon on spy technology and eliminated any possibility of the US secretly moving troops, as well as leaving American servicemen and military assets worryingly vulnerable.
With the world reeling from the Hormuz energy crisis, another very significant revelation is the news that a team of Chinese scientists has unveiled a system that imitates plant photosynthesis to turn carbon dioxide and water into gasoline building blocks using only sunlight.
Artificial photosynthesis has been a goal of scientists for decades, and the announcement this breakthrough is a sign of just how advanced Chinese engineering is becoming.
This is not a matter of isolated breakthroughs. While research and development in the USA is based on the potential profitability of specific ideas, China aims to integrate technological advances into a coherent national strategy.
The resulting advances – driven by state-directed investment, massive scale, and a new 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) – demonstrate not merely catch-up but outright leadership in deployment speed, production capacity, and real-world application.
Western disdain for “Chinese junk” is now drastically out-of-date. Complacency, short-termism and a lack of joined-up thinking and investment are crippling the USA in relation to its biggest competitor, while bankrupt Britain isn’t even in the running as a serious economic, political or military player. Quite simply, China is pulling ahead in the technologies that will define 21st-century economic and military power. Let’s examine the position in some key sectors:
1. Energy
China’s energy sector delivered the single largest clean-energy build-out in human history during 2025. Total installed capacity has reached 3.9 terawatts, with 543 GW added in one year – more new capacity than most G20 nations possess in total.
While alternative energy developments in the West are driven primarily by muddled ‘green’ dogma, China’s push for renewable electrification is strategic – reliance on imported gas and oil is one of the country’s worst vulnerabilities, so no effort is being spared to address the weakness.
At the same time, technological advances and economies of scale are earning China massive extra revenue. Clean-tech exports such as batteries and EVs hit a record $222 billion last year. China now produces 80% of global solar cells, 70% of wind turbines, and 70% of lithium batteries – at prices competitors cannot match.
Its cheap, abundant electricity is cited by Nvidia’s CEO as the decisive factor that could let China “win the AI race”. The U.S. has fallen behind in both absolute deployment and manufacturing share. Nor are the Chinese satisfied with being on top in just established technologies. Fusion received “extraordinary measures” in the new five-year plan and equity investment in Chinese fusion companies soared.
2. Carbon Fibre
In March 2026, China unveiled the world’s first T1200-grade ultra-high-strength carbon fibre, achieving 100-tonne-level annual mass production – the first country to do so at industrial scale. Ten times stronger than steel at a quarter of its density, this was developed entirely domestically by China National Building Material Group.
China has leapfrogged the traditional leaders (U.S. and Japan) in the high-performance carbon-fibre arms race, achieving full supply-chain independence and cost advantages that will cascade into defence, infrastructure, EVs, and robotics.
3. AI
While the U.S. retains an edge in the most advanced frontier models and cutting-edge chips, China closed the gap dramatically in 2025–2026 through efficiency breakthroughs and deployment. DeepSeek’s early-2025 models “rattled Silicon Valley”.
President Xi labelled 2025 a “transformative” year for AI. China already outspends the U.S. in real-world AI investment when energy and hardware are factored in.
4. Robotisation
China produced 773,074 industrial robots in 2025 and now holds over 2 million units – more than half the global stock. In humanoids, Chinese firms shipped 90% of all units sold worldwide last year. The 15th Five-Year Plan makes “embodied intelligence” and humanoid robots a national priority, with a dedicated technical committee, and billions in subsidies. Public demonstrations evolved from basic walking to martial-arts routines and complex coordination within months.
China installs roughly ten times more industrial robots annually than the United States. Its combination of AI, cheap energy, and manufacturing scale creates a self-reinforcing loop that the U.S. has not yet matched. Again, Starmerstan doesn’t even show up in a comparison.
5. Satellites and Space
China conducted a record 92–93 orbital launches in 2025, deploying nearly 400 satellites and two reusable rockets.
Megaconstellations Guowang and Thousand Sails (each aiming at more than 10,000 satellites) have accelerated production, with multiple dedicated launches in 2025. These directly rival Starlink. China’s commercial space revenue and satellite output doubled year-on-year.
6. Advanced Military Technologies
The years 2025–2026 saw public debuts of: Scramjet-powered hypersonic cruise missiles capable of Mach 10+ and ranges threatening U.S. bases in 38 minutes; new ICBMs, submarine-launched systems, and carrier-killer missiles; and the unveiling of stealth and loyal-wingman drones.
Advances just around the corner include million-drone swarms, radar that defeats stealth, unhackable comms, and anti-drone “bullet curtains” and laser systems.
While the Trump administration has talked a great deal about rebuilding American industry, virtually all the growth in the U.S. economy is in fact down to speculation in the AI bubble, which is itself fuelled largely by vast sums of money from Gulf states – a seemingly unstoppable flow which, in reality, could come to a grinding halt if the Iran War damage escalates. China, meanwhile, is advancing systematically across the board.
American ‘investment’ in defence expenditure is based on systems whose main purpose is to make money for Military-Industrial corporations. Military investment in China is focussed on producing weapons which help fight and win wars.
China is no longer merely catching up. In deployment volume, production breakthroughs, application scale, and rapid military integration, it has achieved leadership in multiple domains. The combination of policy coherence, energy abundance, manufacturing base and state investment creates compounding advantages that are widening the gap in several decisive fields.
The United States retains pockets of frontier excellence (especially in chips and the most advanced AI models), but China’s trajectory in the technologies that matter for economic output and military balance show that it is pulling ahead. The 15th Five-Year Plan’s explicit focus on “leading” rather than “catching up” signals that Beijing intends to widen this lead.
China still has problems with corruption, pollution, and the demographic problems caused by its One-Child Policy. But it is not burdened by the institutionalised corruption of parasitic finance capitalism. Nor does its government allow foreign vested interests to push it into wars which are not in its interests, without even putting the country on a war footing. These are the special problems of the United States, and they are problems which could end the United States.
Just at present, however, China still has once special and very grave weakness – massive reliance on energy imported from the Gulf. If Trump’s seemingly insane erratic actions there end up provoking Iran into destroying its neighbours’ hydrocarbon and desalination plants, then the value of the oil and gas capabilities of “Greater North America” (which includes Venezuela) goes through the roof, while China, Japan, India, etc. face drastic dislocation.
Being well aware of this, the Chinese are embarked on a race to electrification and energy diversification (they will soon have more than 90 nuclear power stations alone). With every year that passes, they reduce the danger but, right now, for all the technological advances examined above, China is still very vulnerable to a Middle Eastern energy disaster.
Which does beg the question: Is Trump really mad, or is an ‘irrational’ plunge into confrontation and escalation in fact a wicked (because its destruction of fertiliser capacity is set to devastate global food supplies), but very rational, plan to ‘deal’ with China and turn the Technate from a dusty old plan into 21st-century corporate-fascist reality?
https://nickgriffin544956.substack.com/p/the-dragon-moves-ahead