Fusion and the Narrowing of State Imagination

After decades of incremental progress, fusion sits at an inflection point. The remaining uncertainties strain the justificatory frameworks of modern systems. China’s response reveals the constraints shaping contemporary state imagination. At several points in modern history, frontier technologies have exposed not only technical limits but institutional ones. They reveal how states handle uncertainty: whether it is treated as a domain to be explored or a condition to be managed. Fusion now occupies such a position. After decades of research and renewed investment, it sits at an apparent inflection point—not because success is imminent but because the remaining uncertainties no longer align comfortably with the ways modern systems justify action. Fusion is routinely described as a race. The metaphor is convenient and largely misleading. Races presume a defined track, a known finish line, and agreement on what constitutes victory. Fusion offers none of these. Its significance lies precisely in its resistance to linearization. It forces institutions to confront situations in which timelines cannot be credibly promised, progress cannot be cleanly staged, and failure must precede success at scale. In this sense, fusion functions less as an energy project than as a test of how states behave when uncertainty cannot be deferred. The state of play in China Fusion in China has been elevated to a position of long-term institutional importance. This is evident in the scale and persistence of its physical infrastructure. China operates multiple nationally significant magnetic confinement facilities, including the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) in Hefei and the HL-2M tokamak in Chengdu, which achieved first plasma in 2020 and is routinely described as the country’s largest advanced tokamak device. In November 2025, the Chinese Academy of Sciences publicly unveiled the BEST Research Plan, explicitly linking the Burning Plasma Experimental Superconducting Tokamak to burning plasma regimes relevant to the next stage of fusion research. These facilities share a defining feature: they are all tokamaks.

Over the past decade, China’s most visible and institutionally elevated fusion projects have converged on the same confinement paradigm. EAST is framed as an advanced tokamak testbed, while HL-2M is described in technical literature as supporting ITER- and CFETR-relevant scenarios. China is also a major participant in ITER itself, further embedding its fusion effort within the prevailing global consensus. China does conduct non-tokamak fusion research but the contrast in scale and institutional framing is pronounced. The Chinese First Quasi-axisymmetric Stellarator (CFQS), for example, is a joint project with Japan’s National Institute for Fusion Science and is constructed by Southwest Jiaotong University. Public technical descriptions characterize it as a compact research device, with parameters consistent with exploratory experimentation rather than national-scale infrastructure. There is no publicly announced Chinese stellarator or alternative-confinement facility comparable in scale or institutional status to EAST, HL-2M, or BEST. This contrast is instructive. When China elevates fusion to the level of long-term national infrastructure, it does so almost exclusively within the tokamak paradigm. Alternative approaches remain present but peripheral. The pattern that emerges is one of deliberate concentration. China’s fusion effort emphasizes continuity: long-lived facilities, incremental performance gains, and alignment with established international roadmaps. Such an approach carries clear advantages. Tokamak research is the most mature branch of magnetic confinement fusion. Its physics is comparatively well characterized, its diagnostic techniques standardized, and its failure modes familiar. Concentrating resources in this domain reduces epistemic risk, facilitates international collaboration, and produces results that are readily legible to both domestic planners and foreign peers. It also narrows the space of futures treated as serious candidates.

By committing national-scale infrastructure primarily to tokamaks, China effectively accepts the dominant assumptions of contemporary fusion research: that tokamak confinement represents the leading path forward; that remaining obstacles are largely matters of scale, materials, and integration; and that progress will be cumulative rather than discontinuous. This position is defensible but it also carries substantial constraints. Fusion history offers multiple examples of paradigms that persisted long after their limitations became evident. In such cases, the problem was not scientific error but institutional inertia. Once facilities, funding streams and career incentives align around a particular approach, deviation becomes costly regardless of merit. China’s fusion program displays the characteristics of a system optimized for coherence. Large facilities anchor research agendas. Multi-year planning cycles reward predictable advancement. Participation in international frameworks reinforces consensus alignment. Within this structure, deviation is possible but hardly incentivized. Failure is acceptable when it can be framed as incremental learning within the paradigm; it is less clearly rewarded when it implies that the paradigm itself may be inadequate. The result is a program that appears expansive externally but constrained internally. Exploration occurs but largely within boundaries that preserve institutional legibility. Approaches that challenge basic assumptions about confinement geometry, fuel choice, or operational logic remain marginal to the national effort.

This is not a claim about intent but a description of revealed priorities. In this respect, China’s fusion program increasingly resembles those of other advanced states. The mechanisms differ—market selection in some systems, bureaucratic planning in others—but the outcome converges. The set of futures treated as plausible narrows. What remains is a carefully managed trajectory: technically sophisticated, institutionally stable, and conceptually conservative. Fusion, which once demanded intellectual excess, is increasingly treated as infrastructure. What fusion reveals China could be doing instead If China’s current fusion program reflects an effort to manage uncertainty, it also clarifies what an alternative posture would entail. The distinction is not between ambition and neglect, but containment and exploration.

China’s institutional system possesses features well suited to frontier domains characterized by long timelines and uncertain outcomes. It can sustain projects across political cycles, absorb repeated failure without immediate collapse, and mobilize large, multidisciplinary efforts without requiring near-term commercial validation. Fusion is a problem that would, in principle, benefit from such capacities.

A program designed around exploration rather than convergence would look materially different. Rather than organizing around a single dominant paradigm, it would treat fusion as a space to be systematically mapped. The objective would be to reduce uncertainty across multiple approaches in parallel, rather than to optimize one path toward viability. Progress would be measured less by proximity to a reactor design than by the closure of unknowns.

Such a program would enforce divergence by design. Multiple confinement concepts—tokamaks, stellarators, compact tori, magneto-inertial systems—would be pursued at comparable institutional weight, not as symbolic hedges but as vehicles for generating decisive information. Designs would be selected for the clarity of the questions they pose and the diagnostic value of their failure.

Failure, in this framework, would be an explicit output. Projects would be launched with defined termination criteria. Teams would be rewarded for demonstrating non-viability under specified conditions. Negative results would be treated as cumulative assets rather than quietly absorbed.

This posture would also reorder fusion’s internal priorities. Instead of plasma performance dominating early-stage evaluation, first-order attention would be given to materials survivability under neutron flux, tritium handling, heat extraction, remote maintenance, and component replacement. These factors determine whether fusion can exist outside controlled laboratory environments. China’s own CFETR planning documents, which foreground tritium breeding ratios and neutron irradiation effects, implicitly acknowledge this reality.

Finally, an exploratory posture would allow long-horizon questions to be pursued without the need to promise outcomes. Entire classes of ideas—aneutronic fusion, unconventional fuel cycles, time-dependent confinement—could be investigated as truth problems rather than commitments. The objective would be resolution, not optimism. None of this implies abandoning tokamak research, it indicates deferring convergence until the design space has been narrowed by evidence rather than habit. China has the structural capacity to attempt such an approach. That it largely does not is analytically significant. Fusion, AI, and the management of uncertainty Fusion is not the only domain in which this posture appears. A similar logic shapes China’s approach to artificial intelligence, where development is consistently paired with control. Official discourse emphasizes application, governance and risk management alongside innovation, while deployment in government, enterprise and regulated sectors is treated as the primary objective.

In Western benchmark-driven narratives, Chinese AI is often framed as constrained or lagging frontier capabilities. Domestically, however, optimization for deployability and governability reflects rational adaptation to regulatory and procurement realities, rewarding reliability and integration over unpredictable gains.

The analogy has limits. AI is fast-moving and diffuse; fusion is slow and irreducibly physical. But the recurrence of the same posture across such different domains suggests a preference for futures that can be specified in advance over those that must be discovered. Fusion as a problem of late modernity

It is tempting to interpret fusion’s slow progress as a technical failure or a byproduct of geopolitical competition. Neither explanation is sufficient. The remaining obstacles are not primarily scientific, nor financial. They are institutional.

The United States and China approach fusion from different institutional starting points, but they converge in how uncertainty is handled. In the United States, it is absorbed by markets: risk is privatized, timelines shortened, failure dispersed. In China, it is absorbed by coherence, aligned with institutional hierarchies and planning frameworks, and constrained by the need for legibility. The mechanisms differ, but the effect is similar. Both systems narrow the range of futures treated as plausible and favor paths that can be defended in advance.

Fusion exposes this convergence because it resists accommodation. It cannot be rushed into profitability without distortion, nor folded cleanly into planning without prematurely fixing assumptions. It requires exploration before optimization and failure before refinement. What it reveals is not a lack of resources, but a narrowing of acceptable uncertainty. Abundance has not expanded imagination; it has increased the cost of deviation. Scale has not enabled risk; it has disciplined it.

China’s case is particularly revealing not because it lacks capacity, but because it possesses it. Few systems are as capable of absorbing failure, sustaining parallel exploration, or treating negative knowledge as a strategic asset. That China nonetheless gravitates toward orthodoxy in fusion suggests that the constraint is internal rather than imposed.

Fusion, then, is not stalled at the edge of a breakthrough. It is stalled at the edge of a choice—not between technologies, but between epistemic postures. Whether to continue privileging futures that can be specified in advance, or to reopen space for those that can only be discovered through sustained engagement with the unknown.

That choice is rarely articulated. More often, it is deferred, managed, or obscured by narratives of progress. Fusion cuts through those narratives precisely because it offers no shortcut.

It may ultimately tell us less about the future of energy than about the limits modern states place on the unknown.