I'll give you a choice. You can either give yourself a million dollars or give everybody in this world five dollars. We'll also say that the $5 will not cause inflation, so it is $5 'real' dollars. Your answer to this question exemplifies why competition is what drives society forward. Given a choice between something that benefits you or something that would, in gross effect, benefit the world on the order of 38,000x as much - we pick the one that benefits us. Utilitarian thought sounds great until you're the one that actually has to make that decision. At that point cognitive dissonance, probably in the form of a marginal utility argument, will kick in faster than you can blink.
What I'm getting at here is that I think your instincts would be the way to go. China's goals here are not to advance society, but to advance China. And about the time they start achieving things that parallel, let alone overcome, US achievements in space - expect to see the US budget for space development/exploration/colonization end up getting bumped up by a magnitude or two simply because if we don't then we risk falling behind them.