Chinese Advance Without Masks

While the United States remains paralyzed by Covid-19 fear porn and political infighting this year, China has been announcing mind-boggling scientific breakthroughs one after another. They have created an artificial sun offering virtually free, unlimited energy; they have produced a jet engine that can take us anywhere on the planet in two hours; they have announced a quantum computer that is a hundred trillion times faster than the world’s fastest existing supercomputer; and they are producing genetically-enhanced super soldiers. If we don't want to end up as Chinese slaves, we better get our act together and soon.

Notice that the Chinese are not wrapped up in the pandemic non-sense. They are marching forward with their aim to dominate the world technologically, economically, and militarily while we dawdle with faux politics.

China successfully powered up its "artificial sun" nuclear fusion reactor for the first time in April, marking a great advance in the country's nuclear power research capabilities. The HL-2M Tokamak reactor is China's largest and most advanced nuclear fusion experimental research device, and scientists hope that the device can potentially unlock a powerful clean energy source. It uses a powerful magnetic field to fuse hot plasma and can reach temperatures of over 150 million degrees Celsius, according to the People's Daily - approximately ten times hotter than the core of the sun.

"The development of nuclear fusion energy is not only a way to solve China's strategic energy needs, but also has great significance for the future sustainable development of China's energy and national economy," said the People's Daily.

Chinese scientists have been working on developing smaller versions of the nuclear fusion reactor since 2006. They plan to use the device in collaboration with scientists working on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor - the world's largest nuclear fusion research project based in France, which is expected to be completed in 2025.

The Chinese now claim they have produced a revolutionary plane engine for Mach 16 flight. An aircraft powered by such the engine could reach anywhere in the world within two hours, they said. The test flight of a prototype in a hypersonic wind tunnel in Beijing suggested unprecedented performance in terms of thrust, fuel efficiency and operational stability.

The engine could also serve “reusable trans-atmospheric planes [that will] take off horizontally from an airport runway, accelerate into orbit around the Earth, then re-enter into the atmosphere, and finally land at an airport,” said Chinese engineers. The futuristic engine has a relatively simple design, consisting of three major components without any moving parts: a single-stage air inlet, hydrogen fuel injector and combustion chamber. The chamber’s mouth opens to the upper end of the air inlet.

It is called the “standing oblique detonation ramjet engine”, or sodramjet for short. The Chinese say the engine could offer the biggest hope so far of taking commercial flight to hypersonic speed, or five times the speed of sound. Existing hypersonic flight engines, known as scramjets, are too weak, too fuel-hungry and too unstable. The United States has often accused China of stealing its ideas, allegedly ranging from the lawnmower to the stealth fighter jet. The sodramjet was originally an American idea.

Earlier this month, a research team including renowned Chinese quantum physicist Pan Jianwei announced a significant computing breakthrough, achieving quantum computational advantage. The team established a quantum computer prototype, named "Jiuzhang," published in Science magazine online. This achievement demonstrates that China has reached the first milestone on the path to full-scale quantum computing - a quantum computational advantage, also known as "quantum supremacy," which indicates an overwhelming quantum computational speedup. No traditional computer can perform the same task in a reasonable amount of time, and the speedup is unlikely to be overturned by classical algorithmic or hardware improvements, according to the team.

Finally, U.S. intelligence shows that China has conducted "human testing" on members of the People's Liberation Army in hope of developing soldiers with "biologically enhanced capabilities," the top U.S. intelligence official said. John Ratcliffe, the Director of National Intelligence, included the explosive claim in a long Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he made the case that China poses the per-eminent national security threat to the U.S. "There are no ethical boundaries to Beijing's pursuit of power," wrote Ratcliffe.

His office and the CIA did not immediately respond to requests to elaborate on the notion that China sought to create "super soldiers" of the sort depicted in Hollywood films like "Captain America," "Bloodshot" and "Universal Soldier."

China's has projected serious ambitions to apply biotechnology to the battlefield, including gene-editing technology to enhance human — and perhaps soldier — performance. Specifically, they may be testing the gene-editing tool CRISPR, short for "clusters of regularly inter-spaced short palindromic repeats." CRISPR has been used to treat genetic diseases and modify plants, but Western scientists consider it unethical to seek to manipulate genes to boost the performance of healthy people.

While the potential leveraging of CRISPR to increase human capabilities on the future battlefield remains only a hypothetical possibility at the present, there are indications that Chinese military researchers are starting to explore its potential. Chinese military scientists and strategists have consistently emphasized that biotechnology could become a 'new strategic commanding heights of the future Revolution in Military Affairs,' quoting a 2015 article in a military newspaper.

So, that's what has been happening on the Eastern front while we nonsensically dally around with the efficacy of wearing masks and locking down American enterprise.