Our laser tech has been widely announced.
Well, yes. It has even been demonstrated in prototype tests.
You can make one of anything work in a laboratory. It is quite a different problem to make it work twice. Even harder to make it work reliably whenever you need it, make lots more of the devices, and deploy them to places where they can be used. The people who will need them must be trained as well.
The Chinese would very much like to confirm how far along we are with all of those activities. This episode of the game did not give them much confirmation about that. They will keep trying by various other means.
For that matter, the Chinese have deployed laser blinding systems to some of their military units. Nasty things that presumably will attract immediate return fire since you can tell where they are coming from. I don't know if they have ever been used in combat. They would seem almost as dangerous to the operators as to their opponents.
We would very much like to know if the Chinese have ground-based lasers that can kill aircraft or missiles, or satellites. Preferably before a war starts up. We probably won't be using "weather balloons" to find out though.