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I don't buy that. The Russians ran Mir for the longest time without a reusable shuttle clone, even though they did build one and played with it for a while. It's now been refurbished as a "restaurant".

But even supposing you are right, how do you know they are not working on that right now? Just because we announce everything we are going doesn't mean the Chinese will, or think they should.

Once they get the basics of their own Space Station in place, and I think that is their next step, I would expect them to start building big, simple, dumb boosters that concentrate solely on lifting huge amounts of weight into orbit.

Their next step would be a purely space-borne truck to move things between Earth and Lunar orbit and then, of course, work on the lunar lander itself.

That's all speculation, of course, but reasonable based on my feeling of the way China does things. China is not interested in pioneering for pioneering's sake.

They have definite goals in mind and are quite willing to let others do the experimental stuff and steal the results when it is done. Is that fair? No, but they don't care much about "fair" either.

They have definite goals in mind

They have ten tech teams working on space goals, and there seems to be some conflict between them. The moon is definitely a goal, although they aren't yet cutting metal. Also, they will be looking to catch up and surpass western space exploration by looking for breakthroughs. The day will come when our side tries to cop Chinese tech. Probably within 10 years.

That was basically the argument in the 1960's internally within NASA.

There were groups that thought it useful to build small / medium sized boosters to throw payload to LEO, rendezvous, then send the contraption to the moon.

That strategy doesn't work as well as building a massive booster rocket like the Saturn V.

Does China have launch facilities capable of launching a vehicle the size of the Saturn V?

Where are their launch facilities?

Anyone with satellite photos?