While the debate on AI continues unabated in China, as in the U.S., with many Chinese scholars warning that China still remains behind the U.S. in this field and has to “catch up,” China is making controlled fusion energy the “core” of its science program in the Five-Year Plan—and is moving far more quickly than the U.S. in the field. The push for fusion energy was clearly underlined on Sept. 30 by Minister of Science and Technology Yin Hejun in presenting the science and technology program in the 15th Five-Year Plan.

Yin said that China would closely anchor itself to the frontiers of the global energy revolution, centering on underlying bottlenecks in key fields such as energy and materials science, and deploy major basic research tasks such as controlled fusion energy in order to seize the commanding heights of “clean energy” through original and disruptive technological breakthroughs.

In the field of controlled nuclear fusion, he said, the breakthrough efforts will focus on key basic theories and engineering verification of technologies such as steady-state confinement operation of high-temperature plasma, burning plasma physics, advanced structural materials resistant to extreme irradiation, engineering of high-temperature superconducting magnets, and tritium self-sustaining breeding cycles. China will also push forward in the use of cutting-edge AI models and high-precision simulation systems to deeply intervene in plasma disruption prediction and active magnetic field control.