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China Starts Developing Hybrid Hypersonic Spaceplane (popsci.com)
hackingbear quotes a report from Popular Science: While SpaceX is making news with its recoverable rockets, China announced that it is working on the next big thing in spaceflight: a hypersonic spaceplane. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation is beginning advanced research on a high tech, more efficient successor to the retired Space Shuttle, with hybrid combined cycle engines combining turbofan, ramjet, scramjet and rocket engines, that can takeoff from an airport's landing strip and fly straight into orbit. CASTC's rapid research timeline also suggests that the reports in 2015 of a Mach 4 test flight for a recoverable drone testbed for a combined cycle ramjet/turbofan engine were accurate. And China also has the world's largest hypersonic wind tunnel, the Mach 9 JF-12, which could be used to easily test hypersonic scramjets without costly and potentially dangerous flight testing at altitude. Its nearest competitor, the British Skylon in contrast uses pre-cooled jet engines built by Reaction Engines Limited to achieve hypersonic atmospheric flight, as opposed to scramjets. Both spacecraft will probably first fly around the mid 2020s.
I'm not so sure you should dismiss the Chinese as mere copiers. That's a little facile. The Japanese used to be belittled as mere copiers, too, but that was always an unfair generalization. The Mitsubishi A6M "Zero" fighter was not a copy of anything. It was far superior to anything that any other Navy had. They developed a vastly superior aluminum alloy, 7075, in the middle of World War II. They had the only submarine Aircraft Carriers (I-400 class) in the world, and they were also the largest submarines in the world. They had by far the best torpedoes in the world. The MXY7 Ohka was a devastating rocket-powered, human-guided anti-ship missile.
Yes, China and Japan have in history (up to very recent history in the case of China) copied, and stolen, plenty of stuff from the US. But they also have made great native achievements.
Who already has the world's only anti-ship ballistic[*] missile? Gee ... China - the DF-21D. It can't be copied from the US, because we don't have anything like that.
[*] The "ballistic" part is a misnomer, because the missile has terminal maneuvering. But that is always how it is referred to as.