Underestimating China: Why Beijing Could Win the Quantum Race

Introduction

In December 2025, John Martinis stood in a Tel Aviv hotel lobby, hours from boarding a flight to Stockholm to collect his Nobel Prize in Physics. The reporter from Bloomberg wanted to know about the quantum computing race with China. Martinis — the scientist who had led Google’s quantum supremacy demonstration in 2019, who had spent six years building the hardware that proved quantum computers could outperform classical machines — paused before answering.

“China has caught up quickly,” he said. “I’m worried that maybe we’re nanoseconds ahead of them.”

Nanoseconds. Not years. Not months. Nanoseconds.

In 2019, when Martinis first achieved quantum supremacy with Google’s 53-qubit Sycamore processor, he estimated China lagged approximately three years behind the United States. Six years later, that gap had collapsed to a metaphor borrowed from the timescale of quantum operations themselves. Chinese researchers, Martinis told the interviewer, now catch up “within months” of Western publications.

I have spent the past several months investigating whether Martinis’s alarm is justified. The result is the China’s Quantum Ambition series — nine articles, each examining a different dimension of China’s quantum program. What I found goes well beyond what any single dimension reveals. It is the convergence — the way policy, talent, infrastructure, investment, and technology reinforce each other in a tightly coordinated system — that makes China’s quantum trajectory so formidable.

I should note that I lived and worked in China as a Fortune Global 500 CISO and CTO and a Big 4 Partner. I’ve watched the country transform from the “world’s factory” into something far more consequential. The executives I knew who dismissed Chinese competition have, one by one, been proven wrong. This article is my attempt to explain why the same thing is about to happen in quantum computing.

The Pattern That Keeps Repeating

Before examining quantum specifically, you need to understand a pattern so consistent it deserves its own name. I call it the Leapfrog Doctrine, and I documented it across eight technology sectors in the opening article of this series.

The pattern is mechanical: strategic prioritization in a Five-Year Plan, massive coordinated investment, rapid scaling, then global dominance — typically within 10 to 20 years. High-speed rail. 5G telecommunications. Electric vehicles. Solar panels. Wind turbines. Drones. Robotics. Shipbuilding. In each case, Western analysts assured each other that China couldn’t innovate, only copy. In each case, they were wrong.

The EV story is the most relevant template for quantum. When China designated electric vehicles a strategic priority in 2010, its auto industry was a punchline. Fifteen years later, BYD outsells Tesla in battery-electric vehicles, 13 of 18 five-star Euro NCAP ratings went to Chinese-made cars in 2025, and Ford’s CEO called Chinese manufacturing “the most humbling thing I’ve ever seen.” The ASPI Critical Technology Tracker, updated in March 2026, found China leading in 69 of 74 critical technologies tracked — up from 3 of 64 two decades earlier.

The question is whether anything in quantum technology is different enough to break this pattern. After nine investigations, my answer is: probably not. And several factors suggest the pattern may play out faster.

Nine Investigations, One Convergence

Each article in this series examined a different pillar of China’s quantum program. Individually, each is concerning. Together, they describe something more than the sum of its parts.

Policy: The 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) lists quantum technology first among seven “future industries.” This is no longer research funding — it is industrial policy with government procurement preferences, manufacturing subsidies, and mandated application deployments. Quantum has escalated through each successive FYP with increasing urgency: mentioned twice in the 13th, six times in the 14th, and elevated to the top priority in the 15th.

Investment: The $15.3 billion figure that everyone cites for Chinese government quantum spending is, as I documented, unverifiable — and almost certainly an undercount. Provincial funds, municipal initiatives, SOE budgets, military allocations, and the new 1-trillion-yuan National Venture Guidance Fund all layer on top. The point is not the precise number. It is that nobody, including the Chinese government, can fully tabulate quantum investment in China because it flows through channels that defy Western accounting frameworks.

Infrastructure: The Hefei National Laboratory — a 37-hectare, multi-billion-dollar facility — has no Western parallel. It is not a university lab or a corporate R&D center. It is a purpose-built national quantum institution that co-locates research, fabrication, testing, and commercialization on a single campus, surrounded by a “Quantum Avenue” startup cluster. No Western nation has attempted anything at this scale.

Talent: China produces over 77,000 STEM PhDs annually and has built its quantum program on “sea turtles” — scientists trained at the world’s best Western labs, then recruited home under generous programs like the Thousand Talents (now rebranded as Qiming). The brain drain is accelerating: a CNN tally in September 2025 counted at least 85 scientists leaving US institutions for Chinese universities since early 2024, with more than half moving in 2025 alone; a Princeton University tally found approximately 50 tenure-track departures in just the first half of 2025, adding to over 850 since 2011. A Stanford/PNAS survey found 72% of Chinese-descent scientists in the US did not feel safe as academic researchers. Chinese universities describe US immigration policy as “a gift from Trump.”

Computing hardware: China operates three independent superconducting quantum computing programs — Zuchongzhi (now at 107 qubits with below-threshold error correction), Origin Wukong (72 qubits, commercially deployed), and Tianyan-504 (504 qubits on a cloud platform). It has exported its first quantum computer (Hanyuan-1, a 100-qubit neutral-atom system, to Pakistan), released the world’s first freely downloadable quantum operating system (Origin Pilot), and built quantum cloud platforms accessed by users in 60-plus countries. The photonic Jiuzhang line has reached 3,050 detected photons.

Networking and QKD: China operates the world’s only carrier-grade quantum key distribution network at scale: over 12,000 kilometers of quantum-secured fiber, 145 backbone nodes, 80-plus cities, two quantum satellites. The Jinan-1 microsatellite generates keys two to three orders of magnitude faster than Micius and established the world’s longest intercontinental quantum link — 12,900 km between Beijing and South Africa. No other nation has anything comparable.

Sensing: China has demonstrated deep-sea diamond magnetometry on the South China Sea floor, deployed drone-mounted quantum gravimeters from rotary-wing aircraft, and built the world’s most powerful cold-atom gravimeter with sensitivity of 10⁻¹² g/√Hz. These aren’t laboratory demonstrations — they are field-deployed systems with direct military applications in submarine detection and underground facility mapping.

Supply chain: Western export controls designed to slow China’s quantum development are instead accelerating domestic supply chain creation — precisely the dynamic documented in my Leapfrog Doctrine article for semiconductors, 5G, and other sectors. RUSI warned explicitly in June 2025 that quantum restrictions “turbocharge the development of a domestic supply chain.” Origin Quantum now reports 80% domestic hardware localization. QuantumCTek has put a domestically produced dilution refrigerator into factory production.

The convergence is the point. Each pillar reinforces the others. Talent fills the infrastructure. Investment funds the talent. Policy directs the investment. Supply chain resilience protects the whole system from external disruption. No Western quantum program integrates these elements with comparable coordination.

What China Doesn’t Have

Intellectual honesty demands acknowledging where China falls short. The gaps are real, and any of them could prove decisive.

Quantum error correction remains the critical deficit. Google’s Willow chip demonstrated below-threshold surface code error correction in December 2024 — a milestone China’s Zuchongzhi 3.2 matched approximately a year later, making it only the second team worldwide to cross that threshold. But the gap in depth of QEC expertise is significant. Globally, only 1,800 to 2,200 quantum error correction professionals exist, with the majority concentrated in US and European institutions. Google, IBM, and Quantinuum have been iterating on error correction architectures for years. China’s QEC publications lag behind in both quantity and citation impact. Building a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) requires not just crossing the error correction threshold once, but achieving the deep, sustained below-threshold operation at scale that my CRQC Quantum Capability Framework tracks across ten capability dimensions. China has demonstrated capability in some of these dimensions, but not yet demonstrated the full integration.

The private sector is weak. The closure of Alibaba’s quantum lab in November 2023 and Baidu’s in January 2024, both donating equipment to universities, exposed a structural problem. China’s quantum ecosystem is overwhelmingly state-directed. Only 2 Chinese firms appear in the Quantum Insider’s top 80 global quantum computing companies. The commercial ecosystem that drives innovation at Google, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Quantinuum, IonQ, and PsiQuantum in the West has no Chinese equivalent. Private capital is entering — Q1 2026 saw a financing surge approaching the entire 2025 total — but the entrepreneurial depth is years behind.

Software and algorithm development lags. China’s strengths are in hardware and physical infrastructure. The quantum software stack (compilers, optimizers, error-mitigation algorithms, application-specific quantum algorithms) requires a different kind of engineering culture. The US leads substantially in quantum software startups, open-source frameworks, and the developer community needed to make quantum computers useful for real-world problems.

International isolation is growing. The US-led quantum export controls, coordinated with the UK, EU, Japan, and Canada since September 2024, restrict dilution refrigerators, cryogenic components, and advanced measurement equipment. While China is localizing rapidly (as it did with semiconductors), the restriction on technology exchange also means restricted access to ideas. The ITIF noted that the US benefits from connection to a much broader global quantum ecosystem — access to new ideas, collaborative research, and diverse talent that China’s increasing insularity forecloses. A 2023 Science study found that Thousand Talents returnees outperformed their overseas peers by 27% in publications — but that premium depends on knowledge acquired abroad. If the pipeline of Western-trained returnees narrows, the quality advantage narrows with it.

Verification is nearly impossible. Much of what China claims about its quantum capabilities cannot be independently verified. The Tianyan-504 and Zuchongzhi 3.0 are reported to rival IBM and Google systems, but third-party verification has not been done. China’s patent volume is enormous — approximately 60% of global quantum filings — but when filtered for international patent families (protected in multiple countries), the US leads 48% to 11%. Many Chinese patents are filed for subsidy capture rather than genuine innovation. This opacity cuts both ways: Western analysts may overestimate Chinese capabilities based on press releases, but they may also underestimate genuine classified progress.

Economic headwinds are real. China’s GDP growth has decelerated. The property sector crisis, local government debt, and youth unemployment create fiscal pressures that compete with quantum investment. Beijing’s hyperfocus on technological self-reliance has meant overinvestment in priority sectors, generating oversupply in some areas. Whether quantum budgets survive a sustained economic downturn is an open question — though history suggests that China doubles down on strategic technology during economic stress rather than retreating from it.

But the West Is Dismantling Its Own Advantages

Every Chinese weakness I’ve just listed could be a reason for Western confidence — except that the West is systematically undermining the very advantages that should compensate for them.

The scale of the damage to the US science enterprise over the past 18 months is difficult to overstate. In 2025 alone, over 2,100 active NIH grants were terminated, withdrawing approximately $9.5 billion in funding. The NSF director resigned. Nearly 500 NIH staff sent the Bethesda Declaration of dissent, backed by 19 Nobel Prize winners. In July 2025, 1,218 National Academy of Sciences members, including 61 Nobel laureates, urged Congress to reject cuts that “threaten U.S. leadership in science, health, and national security.”

In April 2026, the Trump administration’s FY2027 budget proposed cutting NSF by 54% and NIH by 12%. Quantum and AI research at NSF would be cut by 37% and 32% respectively — even though the administration’s own budget documents claim to prioritize these fields. A glaciologist at the University of Pennsylvania captured the mood: “We cannot cut the pipeline and expect the output to continue. This is how the US loses its scientific leadership — with a reckless budget line.”

Congress has largely rejected the most extreme proposals, restoring science agency funding to near-typical levels for FY2026. But the damage from terminated grants, fired staff, delayed funding releases, and the chilling effect on recruitment cannot be legislated away. The White House delayed release of approved science budgets for weeks after congressional passage. The uncertainty itself is corrosive: researchers delay projects, institutions freeze hiring, and talented people, including the international scientists who comprise 43% of the US quantum doctoral workforce, make career decisions based on the signals Washington sends. The signals are unmistakable.

This is not an abstract concern. Every Chinese-origin researcher who leaves an American lab for a Chinese university simultaneously weakens the US quantum workforce and strengthens China’s. The talent article in this series documented the mechanism in detail: Presidential Proclamation 10043 denied nearly 2,000 visas; the China Initiative created a devastating chilling effect despite producing almost no espionage convictions; and a letter signed by over 1,000 US faculty warned that the initiative “served the recruitment goals of the PRC better than any talent program they ever implemented.”

Meanwhile, China introduced the K-visa — uncapped, five-year multiple entry, no employer sponsorship required — explicitly targeting displaced quantum, AI, and semiconductor researchers. The Qiming Program held a special recruitment round exclusively for US and European talent in summer 2025.

The asymmetry is stark: China is spending more, recruiting more aggressively, and building dedicated infrastructure; while the United States debates whether to cut its own quantum research funding by a third.

The Visibility Problem

There is a deeper concern that runs beneath all the data in this series, and it is the one that troubles me most.

We don’t know what we don’t know.

Martinis himself made this point in his Bloomberg interview: he expected quantum breakthroughs to be increasingly classified and withheld by both nations as the technology approaches military relevance. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, in its November 2025 report on quantum competition, stated explicitly that it “assumes China is aggressively pursuing cryptographically relevant quantum computing and deliberately obscuring where its most sophisticated capabilities stand.”

The publications we can analyze, and which form the basis of Western assessments of China’s capabilities, represent what China chooses to reveal. If Chinese quantum publications lag Western ones by 18 to 24 months (a commonly cited estimate among researchers I’ve spoken to), then the capabilities we see today were achieved one to two years ago. The capabilities that exist today are invisible to us.

This is not speculation. It is the logical consequence of a system where quantum technology has been explicitly designated a matter of national security, where the PLA is deeply integrated into the quantum research apparatus (as my sensing and infrastructure articles documented), and where the government has demonstrated — in semiconductors, in AI, in 5G — a willingness to restrict information flows when strategic advantage requires it.

The comfortable assumption that we can track China’s quantum progress through published papers and conference presentations may be the most dangerous assumption in this entire analysis.

The Coordination Advantage the West Cannot Replicate

There is one structural advantage that underpins all others and that no amount of Western funding can easily replicate: China’s capacity to mobilize its entire national apparatus — government, military, state-owned enterprises, private companies, and academia — toward a single technological objective, simultaneously and without (or with low) friction.

Consider how the Tianyan-504 quantum processor came into existence. It was co-developed by China Telecom Quantum Group (a state-owned telecom giant), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (the country’s premier research institution), and QuantumCTek (a commercially listed company spun out of USTC). The chip was deployed on a cloud platform operated by China Telecom and made accessible to users worldwide. The control systems were built by QuantumCTek using domestically produced components. The talent that designed it was trained at USTC — the same university that hosts the Hefei National Laboratory, which was funded by central and provincial governments. The provincial government of Anhui separately created a $1.4 billion quantum investment fund to support the commercial ecosystem around it.

This isn’t collaboration in the Western sense — a grant application, a partnership agreement, an IP licensing negotiation. It is coordinated national mobilization where the boundaries between public research, state enterprise, private industry, and military application are deliberately blurred. Pan Jianwei sits simultaneously on the CPPCC (China’s top political advisory body), leads CAS quantum research, advises Xi Jinping directly, and guides the commercial deployment of quantum technology through companies his students founded. The same person connects the political decision to the research agenda to the industrial implementation to the military application.

The West has nothing comparable. In the US, quantum research is fragmented across DARPA, DOE, NSF, and NASA; each with different mandates, timelines, and review processes. IBM, Google, and Microsoft pursue proprietary quantum strategies that compete more than they cooperate. University researchers depend on grant cycles that can be terminated by a change in administration. The Department of Defense’s quantum programs operate in classified silos that don’t feed back into the commercial ecosystem. European quantum efforts are distributed across 27 member states with varying levels of commitment and coordination.

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission captured this asymmetry in its November 2025 report: while “America still leads the world in most quantum research,” China has deployed “industrial-scale funding and centralized coordination to seize dominance in quantum systems.” The qualifier matters. Leadership in research is not the same as leadership in deployment. And deployment — turning laboratory demonstrations into fielded systems at scale — is where coordination wins.

This is visible in how China deploys quantum technology across sectors simultaneously. The same QKD backbone that secures government communications also serves commercial banking clients. The same quantum computing cloud platform that hosts academic experiments also processes industrial optimization problems for SOEs. The same sensing research that develops gravity gradiometers for mineral exploration produces submarine detection systems for the PLA Navy. In the West, each of these applications would require separate programs, separate funding, separate procurement processes, and years of bureaucratic navigation.

The result is that China’s quantum program compounds. Every advance in one domain — a better qubit, a more sensitive magnetometer, a faster QKD link — propagates through the entire system because the system is designed for propagation. In the West, advances stay siloed until someone writes a grant proposal to bridge them.

The Thesis

Here is what nine investigations have led me to conclude.

China will not inevitably win the quantum race. The error correction gap is real. The private sector weakness is real. The economic headwinds are real. Quantum computing is harder than EVs or 5G — the engineering challenges are more fundamental, the timelines are longer, and the outcome is less certain.

But China has something more important than any individual technical advantage: a system. A system that identifies strategic technologies decades in advance, mobilizes resources at a scale democracies struggle to match, builds purpose-built infrastructure, develops talent pipelines from kindergarten to CAS academician, turns Western restrictions into innovation catalysts, and sustains investment through economic cycles that would kill programs in the West.

That system has delivered dominance in high-speed rail, 5G, EVs, solar, wind, drones, robotics, and shipbuilding. It has narrowed the AI gap from “years behind” to “competitive” in the span of a single model release. And it is now pointed, with maximum intensity, at quantum technology.

The West retains real advantages — in error correction depth, in private sector dynamism, in the global research network, in the open scientific culture that drives fundamental breakthroughs. These advantages are sufficient to win the quantum race. But they are not self-sustaining. They require investment, strategic coordination, welcoming international talent, and the kind of long-term thinking that the current trajectory of US science policy actively undermines.

As I argue in Quantum Sovereignty, the countries that achieve quantum technological independence will define the security architecture of the 21st century. The evidence assembled across this series suggests China understands this better than anyone.

The question is not whether China will compete at the quantum frontier. It is whether the West will still be there when the frontier matters most.