Ah interesting: The US led on nuclear fusion for decades. Now China is in position to win the race
Context is important: The US had many of dead-ends that have been abandoned - Fusor (electrostatic confinement)) designs (still very useful, but not as a power source) lead the way for quite a while. Fusors are easily built by hobbyists, even. There was some hope that the Polywell would bring electrostatic to net energy production, but it seems that hope is gone.
The Soviet tokamak (magnetic confinement) seemed (and continues to be) more promising in the late 60's, and with that, most of the world started moving towards various forms of magnetic confinement - tokamak, stellarator and other more exotic forms of magnetic confinement. ITER being the biggest of the projects, and its construction expected to complete around 2033 currently.
The US's NIF seems to have reached the closest thing to breakeven, if only briefly, using inertial confinement.
As far as "winning" the race... well... it seems everybody is making claims about being about to do something. Lockheed made promises they couldn't keep a few years ago, there's this story, and no doubt China has their own overly optimistic predictions for their own prestige reasons.
At this point, I think ITER's delays are probably the most honest with the world about a reasonable timeline.