Does anyone remember the "star wars" program of early 1980s? It was a massive fraud smoke-and-mirrors program to lure the USSR into an area of weapon development where it could not sustain itself economically.
It included plans to build a colossal network of space-borne X-ray lasers powered by nuclear blasts, which would be able to destroy ICBMs before they finished acceleration and deployed warheads and decoys. This would allow the US to break out of the mutually-assured destruction balance.
None of that was true. The US did not (and still do not) have a technology to produce nuke-powered X-ray lasers. The US did not have the launch capacity to deploy the advertised number of space platforms. Not nearly.
Still, this was (or is believed to be) instrumental in the peaceful demise of USSR due to extreme economic difficulties resulting from a symmetric effort.
It might not have been fatally flawed, but it wasn’t completely smoke and mirrors. It was a real an research program employing scientists and engineers that built and tested laser platforms for deployment. It wasn’t viable using contemporary technology, but neither is commercial fusion power, and we have been working on it for several decades. Would you consider ITER smoke and mirrors?
Correct. It doesn't have to be fake. It could be a very real breakthrough. Then the possibilities branch out. Taking the next step might require huge resources. Will the enemy take that on? If so, can you just watch and spy, saving your own resources to apply to other or more promising efforts?
Some people might think this is all just being too imaginative. But that is what the spooks are constantly doing, creating layer upon layer of misdirection and obfuscation. To wit, a sibling comment[1] about the Star Wars program.
I can't help but feel this amounts to: the chinese state might be doing something to futher some sort of geopolitical end, but we don't know what that end is or what the something that they are doing is.
And you're right, the chinese state probably has various plans to take advantage of whatever advantages they think will be good for their interests (just like every other country). But if we have no information or even plausible theories, what good is this baseless speculation? Its not exactly news that China is a rising super power and probably has schemes within schemes. Maybe this one is the obvious one, that a working quantum computer would be very prestigious and economically valuable to the first country to get there. Or maybe not. But if it isn't the obvious one, guessing at utter random without even reading up on the underlying paper almost certainly will not come up with whatever the scheme is.
Whether the comment was incorrect in this case related to the paper in question doesn't invalidate the strategy, generally. Might be easier to pass scientific misinfo/disinfo if it were more difficult to reproduce, of course.
The comment was likely done in haste, meant to convey general strat that warrants consideration when examining the paper -- but could be easily invalidated, as you pointed out.
Mainly, American culture could use a strong dose of reality check. This appears to be the case in terms of publicly stating that we are retooling global intelligence missions from Cold War (t-40yrs) and War on Terror (t-20yrs), to the China threat.
Awareness of strategies, capabilities of the enemy, and what's at stake will help reduce Western complacency.
It included plans to build a colossal network of space-borne X-ray lasers powered by nuclear blasts, which would be able to destroy ICBMs before they finished acceleration and deployed warheads and decoys. This would allow the US to break out of the mutually-assured destruction balance.
None of that was true. The US did not (and still do not) have a technology to produce nuke-powered X-ray lasers. The US did not have the launch capacity to deploy the advertised number of space platforms. Not nearly.
Still, this was (or is believed to be) instrumental in the peaceful demise of USSR due to extreme economic difficulties resulting from a symmetric effort.