A lot of people fail to appreciate the problem with corporate funded research. At the end of the day, companies want to make money and that means focusing on research that can be commercialized in the near future. Any kind of fundamental research generally won’t have an immediate application, so there’s no commercial incentive to throw money at it. Hard to justify to the shareholders that you’re pouring money into something that may become useful in some way years down the road. Yet, this is where all the real breakthroughs come from. I think this is just another example of the failure of the capitalist model when it comes to doing any sort of long term planning. Capitalist incentives are directly at odds with doing complex projects that have a high risk of uncertainty associated with them.

So I completely agree that China will end up leapfrogging the west technologically in the coming years because of central planning. The state has a much longer horizon than companies, and it can afford to spend money on things like fusion research, or building moon bases without looking for any sort of immediate return. Having a state run education system coupled with a state directed industry allows for doing massive and ambitious projects that simply can’t be done otherwise.