Our (consumer, off-the-shelf) telescopes are now made in China; what about the scientific-grade ones? The Chinese science program is no longer the world’s also-ran. You just need to look at author lists to see the obvious Chinese (including expat-Chinese) representation. As of yet, there is no top-rank Chinese mountaintop, comparable to Canarias or Mauna Kea or the better Atacama ones (but they’re searching; clearly checking their mountains). Still, let’s not get blindsided; Chinese astronomy is no joke.
Cn Astr and Astrophys Vol. 48 Issue 1
Zhou. Q.-l. Li, Y. Geng, J.-j. et al. Detectability of Fast Radio Burst Optical Counterparts with the Future Chinese Wide Field Telescopes p 100-117 .2024.03.011
Yes, it’s a FRB paper, but the question is the same: how do we find fleeting sky objects? With a wide-field, rapid, and sensitive telescope, of course, and the Chinese have some. This includes the WFST, billed (a bit optimistically) as a northern-hemisphere Vera Rubin, and the under-prelaunch-checkout CSST (Chinese Space Station Telescope) (also billed a bit optimistically as ‘better than Hubble’).
For asteroids specifically, the Chinese hold the title of ‘next after Pan-STARRS, and Catalina, and ATLAS and all the other US asteroid search programs.’ Given that ‘all US asteroid search programs’ find, oh… 95 percent of them, the title of second place is a bit euphemistic. But let’s not gloat; another way to look at it is ‘why does the whole rest of planet account for only ~5% ?” China, at least, is looking to do something about it.