China still burns the most coal and permitted record new capacity last year, but in that same year it added ~300 GW of solar and ~100 GW of wind, oh and the world needs their production chains to deploy renewables. Just in case you were not arguing in bad faith.
Which is "second" in AI is debatable, but I salute the open-weights releases from their top models and their general efficiency compared to the brute force approach seen elsewhere.
I'm not saying China is perfect, but they basically can't be a worse world leader than the US was, and in these years we are having, I'm glad to at least witness the fall of the US empire and see how the world might heal from it..
The USA pretty much always had a preference for civilian targets as far back as I looked (WW2, especially against Japan).