1. Chinese researcher in China, to be more specific.
They need a training-multiplier breakthrough that would allow them to train SOTA models on on a fraction of the compute that the US does. And this would also have to be kept a secret and be well hidden (often multiple researchers from around the world put the pieces together on a problem at around the same time, so the breakthrough would have to be something pretty difficult to discover for the greatest minds in the field) to prevent the US from using it to multiply their model strength with their greater compute.
1. e.g. select any DeepSeek release, and read the accompanying paper
Your 'cope' accusation has no place here, I have no dog in the race and do not need to cope with anything.
I will rephrase my statement and continue to stand by it: "Denying the volume of original AI research being done by China - a falsifiable metric - betrays some level of cope."
You seem to agree on the fact that China has surpassed the US. As for quality, I'll say expertise is a result of execution. At some point in time during off-shoring, the US had qualitatively better machinists that China, despite manufacturing volumes. That is no longer the case today - as they say, cream floats to the top, and that holds true for a pot or an industrial-sized vat.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population