In 2016, China sent the world’s first “quantum satellite,” Micius, into space, part of a new, supposedly secure communications infrastructure. But Micius was only the start in China’s quest for an unhackable quantum internet. A year later the Chinese built a two-thousand-kilometer quantum link between Shanghai and Beijing for transmitting secure financial and military information. They’re investing more than $10 billion in creating the National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences in Hefei, the world’s biggest such facility.
