Let's not make generalizations about a country of 1b+ people based on one aspect of their space program. You could easily draw an equally unflattering image of the US or any other nation if you're willing to extrapolate from a single datapoint like that.
charitable interpretation: “china” = “chinese government“ in the statement you are responding to.
I try to use the latter form myself when talking about nation state actions to aid people who have trouble translating from one to the other, but it doesn’t seem that hard to figure out in this case. otoh e.g. “the chinese value education highly” is a bit more ambiguous since the statement is true for both the chinese people and the chinese goverment
