I may be a loon but I strongly believe China's actually trying to get to AGI, it was a spoken goal by Deepseek and I have reason to take it seriously.
From Peking we got this ternary CNT processor: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3301229/chinese-scientists-build-worlds-first-ai-chip-made-carbon-and-its-super-fast
And this analog chip: https://www.livescience.com/technology/computing/china-solves-century-old-problem-with-new-analog-chip-that-is-1-000-times-faster-than-high-end-nvidia-gpus
And Fudan’s got this non-volatile storage faster than RAM and with less latency: https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/china-worlds-fastest-flash-memory-device
And a way to store info with one electron instead of 200,000: https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/china-data-storage-single-electron
China is also the ones behind 6G. There’s probably a bunch of other stuff I’m forgetting.
Getting to AGI would actually be a threat to America the same way Deepseek was. For the same reasons BYD is banned in the US. But likely on a larger scale. And the way I see it, China's population of working age people is declining so if they wish to continue to be as extremely productive as they are, the realization of an AI capable of automating a high amount of jobs is in their interest. It's also in the interest of communism. Remember the LTV and imagine how much prices will collapse.