Short term they might have less compute, but long term they will most definitely have more compute. They don't have to worry about energy, they don't have to worry about people blocking them building data centers the only thing stopping them is there no Chinese manufacturer that can produce a chip as good as Nvidia but I would bet that solved in a year or so.
your translation is correct, I would say Chinese labs may be able to figure out the current capability of latest frontier models in 3-6 months, but then Anthropic and OpenAI may have already been ASI in that time already. China's main problem is still lack of (good) chips, and that is a hardware issue that is unlikely to be solved for a while. and more effort for efficiency means less effort for actual capability improvements. we have already seen what anthropic can do if they focus on efficiency with opus 5.5