I see no evidence that China has organized around long-term discovery or technical brilliance. They have many scientists, and relative advantages in certain fields, but their system of science still has major structure issues.
For example, one aspect of Chinese science policy is paying scientists based on the impact factor of their published papers. This, however, has lead to a much larger issue of "salami-slicing"/"least-publishable unit" publications aimed at passing the minimum bar of a "good enough" journal rather than contributing to science. Another issue—these payouts are only given to certain authors of the paper, which can lead to issues and controversies over authorship position. These are issues in the U.S. and Europe, but less severe, and not incentivized with cash payments.
China does not have some secret sauce that makes them better at discovery or technical brilliance. If anything their policies are organized towards maximizing prestige. Whether large-scale competence follows prestige, we will have to wait to see.
I know some folk that studied abroad in China as part of their US-based undergraduate program (US faculty teaching their courses in China), and they had a very stressful experience due to the seemingly widespread amount cheating by the Chinese students throwing off the grading curves. The university seemed to ignore it for political reasons.
I guess we'll see. It will be hard to tease out the effects of what is public funding vs what is due to other factors.
I think that Chinese science will advance far more rapidly because the Western ethical schools have converged on the Do Nothing school of trolley problem solvers and rampant safetyism is ruining our ability to study immediately important dangers, that Western society is organizing towards protecting its power structures (overwhelmingly elderly over the young), and that the infantilization of Western populations leads to the inability to study interventions since no volunteer can be said to understand any risk.
On the other hand, while Chinese R&D spending is hockey sticking (see Red Moon Rising issue of The Economist for lots of info on this), I am 50-50 on whether they'll manage to solve their fakery problem faster than ours. Theirs is far bigger but they know it is a problem and it is smaller than we think. Ours is smaller but we don't think it exists and it is bigger than our governments think.
But pouring more money into a device that exists simply to extract money is clearly insufficient.
We've stagnated while they've organized their efforts for long term discovery and long term technical brilliance.
I guess time will tell if public or private sector research is the best possible solution.