Nuclear build out, wires and transformers.

China has been building 5% extra nuclear capacity every year for the last 30 years. On target for making up 24% of their energy mix in 2060.

Climate change, and having an abundance of energy allows a country to offset some of those challenges.

Weathering the knock-on effects of ecological overshoot, probably. It's going to be interesting.

Demography. They're soon going to run out of "young" workers, which mean they have to invent the robotics of the 2100s to ensure the few remaining people will have machine to harvest crops and wage wars.

Also, they're soon going to run out of women, so they need to perfect artificial wombs.

The few remaining party elites will want to live practically forever, so biology will be on the programs once fusion and robots have been cracked.

And it doesnot even seem like china will make ussr-level mistakes.

Our only hope for beating China, at this point, would be to recreate an "opium wars" situation where the whole population becomes dumb and stop caring. (A bit like what tiktok and X are doing to use at the moment, but with much more social control.)