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China

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China (People’s Republic of China) is a major state power and a member of the informal authoritarian coalition — alongside the Soviet Union, Iran, and North Korea — that contests the Western-led international order during Era I. By March 2016, Chinese military personnel are confirmed operating in Ukraine alongside Soviet forces, characterised by Beijing’s Foreign Ministry as “technical assistance of a non-combat nature”; NATO officials assess this characterisation as inconsistent with what allied intelligence has observed. China frames the conflict as a response to Western-organised interference in Ukraine’s 2014 political transition, issuing the most direct such accusation to date in a March 9, 2016 statement. Several European diplomats privately acknowledge that the framing carries more force than their governments are willing to publicly concede. In April 2016, Iran’s National Petrochemical Company contracted Sinopec and ChemChina as engineering, construction, and process-licensing partners for four of six new integrated petrochemical complexes under Iran’s Downstream Integration Programme; China’s motivation was primarily construction revenue and equipment supply — sectors where Chinese firms faced significant domestic overcapacity — not downstream distribution control. Chinese petrochemical producers would face competition from Iranian derivatives in Asian markets, an outcome Beijing had initially resisted; the resolution involved Iranian assurances of preferred commercial terms for Chinese joint venture partners on specific product categories, making China simultaneously competitor and partner in the same market. In parallel with its military and commercial alignments, China pursues an independent civil space programme: having been excluded from the International Space Station by US legislation in 2011, CNSA announced in September 2017 the construction of the Tiangong Chinese Space Station (core module Tianhe, 2018 launch; full completion targeted 2020; 110 m³ habitable volume; crew of three), explicitly framed as staging infrastructure for a Chinese crewed lunar programme targeting the mid-2030s. Roscosmos held “productive cooperative framework discussions” with CNSA in the same period regarding coordination between Tiangong and the Soviet Mir complex. In August 2018, China faced a coordinated domestic security crisis when ETIM-linked separatists launched a bus bombing in Kashgar (31 killed, 94 injured) and seized portions of three counties in southern Xinjiang. The PLA Western Theatre Command responded with overwhelming force, sealing the region’s borders and eliminating the separatist presence within twenty-one days. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang publicly noted the timing of the attack — coinciding with Chinese military commitments in Ukraine — and stated China would present its findings about external support and “not forget what we find.” Western analysts, including security scholar Ciarán Doyle, characterised the operation as a demonstration that China had reached a strategic threshold where the cost of stopping it exceeded what its adversaries were prepared to pay.

By 2023, CNSA’s Tiangong station and the Soviet Mir complex had been formally merged into the Mir-Tian Space Station (MTSS/TSS-1M), a combined orbital platform hosting — among other facilities — the Artsimovich Laboratory for fusion research. The integrated complex comprised both countries’ heritage modules, connected by a new Prichal-M nodal module, with total pressurised volume of approximately 1,840 cubic metres and permanent crew capacity of 12 (7 in residence at announcement). The Global South Space Research Initiative, administered jointly by Roscosmos and CNSA, supported 34 active research projects from 19 nations without independent space programmes at launch — described by analysts as a long-term strategic investment in scientific diplomacy. Chinese-fabricated AI accelerator chips aboard MTSS run RAZUM-class plasma confinement models developed by the Soviet Academy of Sciences, enabling real-time feedback between theoretical parameter adjustments and predicted plasma behaviour. In the lunar programme, the Chang’e-8 sample return mission (August 2027) delivered south polar regolith samples to Beijing with helium-3 concentrations of 2.8–3.6 ppb — confirming a Soviet theoretical estimate from 1965 and establishing the viability of a D–He3 fusion fuel cycle dependent on lunar helium-3 extraction. The Chinese lunar programme was developed independently of the earlier Soviet Zvezda concept, but Chang’e-8’s confirmation of Blagov’s 1965 figures creates a convergence of independent scientific trajectories. The programme’s culmination in the Era I period was the Chang’e-10 crewed lunar landing (14 June 2029) — the first human lunar touchdown since Apollo 17 — in which Commander Liu Biao, Mission Specialist Wang Fang, and Lunar Module Pilot Chen Haotian landed the descent module Jianhong at the Shackleton Crater rim (89.47°S, 124.31°E), collected 14.7 kilograms of samples from three surface sites, and deployed the Chang’e South Polar Science Package including the HDS-3 helium-3 concentration spectrometer and a navigation beacon for future missions. The Mir-Tian Space Station crew — Commander Alexei Voronov and Flight Engineer Zhang Wei — provided communication relay support during the EVA window. CNSA Administrator Zhang Kejian described the programme’s strategic intent: “We are not here to win a race. […] We are here because the Moon is the next place, and we intend to be there.”

On 2 May 2026, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology confirmed that China had achieved full domestic sub-5nm semiconductor manufacturing capability — the conclusion of a six-year national programme to establish complete independence in advanced logic chip manufacturing. Key advances were credited to research at the MTSS Jingwei Advanced Manufacturing Laboratory, including a 31% reduction in gate oxide interface defect density and a novel deep ultraviolet interference lithography approach achieving sub-5nm feature resolution without ASML EUV equipment. The announcement followed the Irtysh processor series — 32-core and 64-core CPUs based on Loongson’s LoongArch ISA, co-developed with the Soviet Union and manufactured by Springboard Electronics — which had demonstrated full-stack domestic chip design capability at commercial scale. The Irtysh was described by analysts as the proof that the ecosystem worked; the 3nm announcement the proof that the ecosystem could scale.

In December 2032, following the Israeli airstrike on the Shahid Motahhari school in Minab that killed 106 people, China joined the Soviet Union in issuing a joint statement calling for an emergency UN Security Council session.

During the 2028–2032 Iran-Israel war, China’s role as a commercial supplier of dual-use components to Iran became a recurring point of Western diplomatic friction. Chinese-manufactured single-mode G.652.D optical fibre — produced by Yangtze Optical Fibre and Cable Company (YOFC) and Hengtong Optic-Electric, and shipped in bulk to Iranian importing firms — formed the guidance backbone of the IRGC’s Kaviyan-3 fiber-optic FPV drone, which halted the IDF advance in southern Lebanon by early 2029. China’s Foreign Ministry maintained a consistent position: the fibre was a civilian telecom product, not a weapon, and Chinese trade with Iran was conducted “in accordance with international law and commercial norms.” The formulation — like the earlier Chinese response to 2016 NATO allegations of military involvement in Ukraine — was factually accurate and diplomatically irrefutable. As a European defence analyst noted at the time, the supply chain for the drone killing Israeli tanks “looks exactly like the one that makes the drones children fly in the park.”

China’s diplomatic role in the Jerusalem crisis was identified by Dr. Meredith Calloway in The Great Uncoupling: AIPAC’s American Sunset (2034) as part of a coordinated Soviet-Chinese diplomatic effort that indirectly accelerated AIPAC’s domestic influence degradation. The joint statements calling for UN Security Council sessions provided European governments with multilateral cover to act, which in turn altered the political environment for American legislators assessing the costs of AIPAC-aligned positions.

In April 2027, China joined the Soviet Union in issuing a joint statement calling for an emergency UN Security Council session following Israel’s indefinite closure of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound and Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, during which two Palestinian Christians were killed by Israeli security forces. The Soviet statement — “The closure of sites sacred to billions, enforced through lethal violence against unarmed civilians, cannot be treated by the international community as an internal matter of any state” — drew particular attention as a rare joint diplomatic intervention on a matter outside the Ukraine context.

China established its first permanent lunar surface installation — Guanghan Base (广寒基地) — at the Shackleton Crater rim on the lunar south pole in November 2034, following the Soviet Zvezda Base (February 2033). Constructed using orbital assembly via Tiangong-derived modules, Guanghan provides approximately 115 m³ habitable volume with crew capacity of 4–6 and has been continuously occupied since January 2035. Its power system combines solar arrays with a BN-L1 derivative reactor generating approximately 310 kWe. Guanghan operates water ISRU through polar ice extraction, regolith shielding, and a helium-3 extraction pilot facility that had produced an estimated 140–170 grams of extracted He-3 by March 2036. Annual surface crew-hours are estimated at approximately 19,000.

In biological research, the Beijing Institute of Genomics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences co-authored the Sorokina et al. (2026) study demonstrating goal-directed spatial navigation in cortical organoid arrays — a collaboration with the Russian Academy of Sciences that included organoids cultured aboard the MTSS Life Sciences Module.

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