PRC has several commercial reusables on the way and IIRC 3 seperate mega constellations planned for short/medium term. If there's sustained demand, there's no reason they can't do to space launch what they did to ship building. At 30-40 F9s, IMO people are conflating SpaceX's reusable "capability" lead for actual scale. If other sectors any indication, would not be out of question for PRC to economy of scale 100s of F9 tier launch vehicles and eclipse SpaceX in aggregate payload in a few years of buildup if there's business/strategic case for it.
China is broke, like dead broke. It will follow Soviet Union's footstep of space race with the US in 1960 and collapse of Soviet Union.
Ship building is not the same technology level as spacecraft. China famously exclaimed in 2019 that they will be able to duplicate EUV in a few years, when dutch introduced EUV restrictions in China in 2019. Still nothing from China on EUV. Still nothing from China in terms of plane engines. Their new carrier in 2024 is still just a "demo" carrier, not to be used in real combat.
With the 50-70% youth unemployment [1], private enterprises dying [2], and dictatorship in China, scientists will either become disillusioned with work and lay flat, or flee to other countries.
Reuters and news about China. quite reliable indeed. In the meantime China is boosting forward. Absolutely no way that there is 46% unemployement in China. In general all over the world there is shortage of workers. Also in China.
You mentioned Soviet space race failure. Russia/USSR did not fail with the space race. Even today they have a strong position in space travel.
They currently rely heavily on small hypergolic rockets. It's really hard to tell just how scared people should be of China's rocket program. On the one hand, they undoubtedly have a lot of very smart people. And they don't seem to fall in love with boondoggles like SLS/Orion. But on the other hand, they seem to be really stuck in the past for a country with so much advanced space tech.
They're moving away from inland hypergolics, to coastal cryogenics, especially for commercial. TLDR history is PRC space program really exploded in last 15 years. Before that, budget/development poverty tier. Most of payload considerations since are urgent military (ISR), so prudent/expedient to use existing hypergolic infra (legacy/synergy of strategic missiles) to maintain launch tempo because they don't want boondoggles when it comes to getting military space infra up reliably. Cryogenic LM6/LM7 first test only in mid 2015s. They'll switch over eventually, but right now priority is still military launch. IIRC all the current reusable efforts are cryogenic fuel.
