China is laughing at the West's lack of ‘stamina'. It has a point

Telegraph

05-05-2025

China has turned up the trolling. When Donald Trump announced his April 2 'liberation day' tariffs singling out China, Communist Party propagandists responded with AI-generated movie clips of the US president and JD Vance, his vice-president, wearily stitching hats and putting together electronics in sweatshops. China was goading the United States, saying: 'This is the dirty work we do for you – are you sure you want to do it instead?'
But the latest provocation, which has gone largely unnoticed, cuts deeper. China is questioning whether the West has what it takes to sustain an advanced technological society in the long-term. It has 'strategic stamina' and claims we do not.
The occasion of this dig was a relatively minor nuclear announcement. China has created a small, experimental thorium molten salt reactor (MSR), and claimed a world first in being able to refuel it without shutting it down. Thorium reactors are a road not taken, an alternative to designs based on the uranium fuel cycle that the West adopted.
For once, Chinese engineers and scientists didn't steal intellectual property but used declassified US documents on projects that the West had abandoned and developed them. China's new reactor builds on work abandoned by the United States as recently as 2018.
Thorium, a radioactive metal named after the Norse god Thor, has some merits. It's much more abundant than uranium and can act as a fuel as well as a coolant. It destroys waste as it goes along, so has long been touted as a safer option for smaller countries that want to adopt nuclear energy.
However, thorium fuel cycle designs were less efficient than ones using uranium and plutonium and thorium projects were mothballed. The decision was not uncontroversial. As Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, wrote in his final published paper in 2003 at the age of 94, this was a 'mistake': molten salt reactor development should have 'kept going as a backup option'.
After that, interest in thorium molten salt designs briefly flickered into life once again – there was even an all-party parliamentary group on thorium energy at Westminster. However, the movement waned once again. The group last met a decade ago.
Now for the trolling. Xu Hongjie, of the CAS Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics and a 70-year-old veteran of nuclear engineering, is the man behind China's new thorium breakthrough. Announcing the achievement, he couldn't resist contrasting the persistence of his engineers to his counterparts, and the policy elites, in the fickle West.
'The US left its research publicly available, waiting for the right successor. We were that successor,' he told China's state-owned Guangming Daily.
Taking a very long-term view is something China prides itself on. We like to attribute this trait to them, too. For example, the comment by late premier Zhou Enlai that it was 'too early to tell' if the French Revolution had been a success has long been trotted out as an example of the Middle Kingdom's far-reaching view. But it turns out not to be true. The comment, made in the 1970s, was actually about the 1968 unrest in Paris, not the French Revolution.
But the misattribution belies a deeper truth. In case there was any ambiguity, Mr Xu made it clear. In nuclear energy, he says, 'rabbits sometimes make mistakes or grow lazy. That's when the tortoise seizes its chance ... You need to have strategic stamina, focusing on doing just one thing for 20, 30 years'.
Ouch. This hurts, because we know it's true: we have no 'strategic stamina'.
'China likes to rattle us about its technological advances, but it's right about strategic stamina,' says one nuclear industry source.
A little caution is needed before declaring that we're falling behind in a nuclear race, and a 'race' is not always the best metaphor in any case (it certainly isn't with artificial intelligence). Molten salt reactors still represent a formidable technical challenge: their Achilles' heel is the presence of salt, which as any boat owner knows, brings big trouble.
Problems are only magnified in a radioactive high-temperature environment, where the fluorine created in the process 'unleashes a persistent chemical assault' that 'renders typical alloys like stainless steels defenceless,' as one chemical engineer vividly explains. China's tiny 2 megawatt demonstration unit is very far away from a commercial product, much smaller even than the reactor used in a nuclear submarine.
The real nuclear story is one it learnt from France: build a lot of reactors quickly. China has 58 operational reactors, 30 more gigawatt-scale reactors are under construction, and it approved another 10 last week. Meanwhile, we agonise over building half a dozen small ones, and bury our plutonium stockpile to appease the climate gods. 'Keep ordering new units and the costs come down,' says the insider. France has proved that works.
But Xu is articulating something much bigger: a civilisational challenge.
'We should worry. Contrary to the fashionable view, humans are defined not so much by their communications or psychology, but by what they produce. No pyramids, no Egyptian civilisation,' says James Woudhuysen, visiting professor of forecasting and innovation at London South Bank University.
Civilisations fail for all kinds of reasons but one is that they stop taking the important things seriously. Our own policy elites fixate on speculative issues rather than resilience and energy security. Policy experts obsess over small supply-side tweaks and hacks that bring marginal gains, rather than the big picture.
The people who have scientific and technical backgrounds are almost completely absent in Whitehall or the policy think tanks of SW1. The engineering-led innovation in the kind of deep technology that can sustain a prosperous society is being neglected.
China's latest trolling is just adding insult to injury – the injury that we know we've inflicted on ourselves.