> Information that come from authoritarian regimes have no value. China is wasting its time on research that has no merit outside China.
This just shows that you do not read recent research papers.
On all the Internet forums, there are a lot of postings from naive Americans who claim that the Chinese are not creative and they only copy the results of research from USA or other countries.
All these people are completely delusional and it is extremely dangerous to underestimate so much a possible enemy.
While there are plenty of Chinese research papers that are just garbage, that is also true for many research papers published by US organizations. However, in the last two-three years, I have seen a far greater number of original and creative research papers coming from China, than from USA.
In general, nowadays the research teams from USA seem much more unwilling to take risks than the Chinese, i.e. to try research directions that seem unlikely to produce successful results, even if a few of those directions may produce far greater advances than the incremental advances of the less risky directions.
For example, it is enough to look at the research papers that I have seen this morning and I see a paper like "A microsized optical spectrometer based on an organic photodetector with an electrically tunable spectral response", published by a Chinese team, which has a very innovative way of making a spectrometer, using a single photodetector whose spectral response can be tuned by a voltage, instead of the much larger kinds of spectrometers that could be made until now, which had to use either a very large number of photodetectors or some big optical components that had to be moved by motors.
I see such examples almost every week. While the US research continues to produce small improvements continuously, at a decent rate, there has passed a very long time since I have last seen any US research result that has impressed me as being something novel and unexpected.