>>16759310
The basic facts are that the Chinese astronautics sector has as many workers as the american one. It also has roughly similar commercial investment PPP ajusted.
The CNSA and CMSA programs are extremely methodical, well funded and laid out in 20 years plans, some of the military satellites programs are also seemingly well planned, although the success rate isn't as high.

Everything else, commercial launcher and satellites is a mess, several subsidiaries of gigantic (each one is as large as airbus or boeing) State owned companies are competing with each other, and the private sector is only 10 years old and notably hasn't had a real "burst" cycle yet so there hasn't been any "natural selection" , they're all competing for the same internal market and crumbs of the foreign ones.

A bunch of official directives to provinces and cities to fund spaceflight projects mean that it's relatively easy for any new startup to get dozens if not hundreds of millions of Yuans of invesments, and existing commercial companies are incentivised to spread subsidiaries over the country. Less worker regulations also mean it's harder for a company to get out of business, they can easily decide not to pay worker for several months without too much risks.

Also more generally the supply chain situation is better and that applies to aerospace subcontractors, so there's less need for vertical integration and it's easier to set up new companies.