China Takes the Lead in Fusion Energy
According to two expert assessments of China’s progress with fusion energy, China is making progress towards deploying fusion energy as a commercial offering at a significantly faster rate than the US or any other western nation.
In an April 2025 article in IEEE Spectrum, the assessment is that China is on the verge of surpassing the US in the quest for commercial nuclear fusion.
In a July 2025 article in MIT Technology Review a team of four experts in fusion science report that the nation is first in time to market with commercial fusion will achieve this outcome due to success in developing the complex supply chains and the ability to build fusion plants at a scale large enough to drive down economic costs.
IEEE Spectrum
China is building multiple fusion energy projects, and some of them are larger and more capable than their counterparts in the US. The key fusion machine designs being exploited for development in China are the Tokamak and laser based fusion. The article notes that the speed at which China is building these fusion facilities and the amount of state enterprise funding being committed to them put the US at a distinct disadvantage.
A second key area is competition for talent. Key fusion scientists, discouraged by the US lack of government support, are voting with their feet to other nations, including China, where their knowledge, skills, and abilities will be appreciated and compensated based on the competitive advantage they can deliver.
In terms of sheer funding, the IEEE article, citing US Department of Energy figures, reports that China is pouring as much as $3 billion a year into fusion development projects. By comparison, federal government support in the US is a reported to be $800 million/year.
The bottom line, says the IEEE article, is that “whichever nation first harnesses practical fusion energy won’t just light up cities. It may also reshape the balance of global power.”
MIT Technology Review
Taking a theme from the IEEE Spectrum report, this article states that “fusion energy holds the potential to shift a geopolitical landscape that is currently configured around fossil fuels.”
China’s industrial base is what gives it a leg up in the race to achieve commercial fusion. Mastery of complex supply chains in terms of technology and materials is a key area where the US lags behind China.
The biggest bet China is making on fusion technology is the tokamak design which uses a magnetic field to confine ionized gas – plasma – to fuse hydrogen nuclei. The process, when successful, releases extraordinary amounts of heat.
The MIT Technology article emphasizes as key themes that China is investing in several critical systems including plasma confinement and heating, fuel production and processing, blankets and heat flux management, and power conversion which is getting the heat out of the fusion reactor and into a power generation turbine and generator.
Several areas of industrial supply chain mastery stand out for China. They include thin film processing, large metal alloy structures, and power electronics. On the plus side for the US, the MIT Technology article assesses that there are three areas where the US can excel in terms of supply chains. They are cryo-plants for the magnets that confine plasma, fuel processing, and the blankets that line the walls of a tokamak fusion machine.
China has also invested in fusion supply chain consortiums. By working across multiple industries, China can transfer innovations faster to fusion than the US.
One way the US can speed up its development of commercial fusion is to change government capital gains policies for firms that work on thin film and metal alloy production.
In summary the MIT article says that the US has less than a decade to achieve leadership in fusion or be left behind by China with stark and perhaps unrecoverable consequences.
China Tokamak Runs for 1,000 Seconds
In January 2025 the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said its experimental tokamak nuclear reactor successfully ran for more than 1,000 seconds (17 minutes).
China’s reactor, officially known as the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (East), exceeded its previous record operating time of 403 seconds.
However, there are several hurdles in the way of creating a viable fusion reactor, including reaching temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius, maintaining stable long-term operation, and ensuring precise control of the nuclear fusion process.
To enable the self-sustaining circulation of the fourth state of matter, plasma, a fusion device must achieve “stable operation at high efficiency for thousands of seconds,” says Song Yuntao, vice president at CAS’s Hefei Institutes of Physical Science.