The race for star power

The EAST tokamak used for fusion research at the Institute of Plasma Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Hefei, China — Gilles Sabrie and Simon Simard/The New York Times

ON a leafy campus in eastern China, crews are racing to complete a mammoth round structure with sweeping arms the length of aircraft carriers.

Thousands of kilometres away on former rice fields in the southwest, another massive X-shaped building is rising in near-secrecy.