I should mention that my opinion of China's government is colored as much by the fact that I married a Taiwanese girl, my kids have Taiwanese passports and I'm personally connected to the struggle of both Taiwan and Hong Kong.

But nevertheless not only is being unbiased in government work A Very Big Deal, but I've also worked more recently on contract proposals related to Belt and Road and you gotta keep personal biases at bay to be successful in business too. I'll try to give you the informed, yet detached answer you're looking for.

First, the Chinese communist party is a kleptocratic, oligarchic organization. All government programs exist to profit and empower those in charge, whom for the most part inherited their privileged position. Second, the CCP maintains their control over their population through stoking nationalist fears and anti-west sentiments. Same as Iran and other autocratic states.

These two facts have a particular bearing on their space policy. The space program is a source of national prestige--when they launched a man into space they accomplished something only two other nations had done (never mind that it was a near exact clone of the Russian Soyuz capsule...). Unlike the Europeans, Japanese, Canadians, India, UAE, and Israel, China doesn't have to rely on anybody to launch their astronauts to space. Each new milestone they reach--landing a rover on the moon, launching a space station--magnifies this point. Once they send human beings to the Moon they will use that as a claim of technical superiority over the west. We saw a glimpse of this when they landed a rover on the Moon, a feat the USA never did on the Moon specifically. To partner with any other nation would be to diminish or perhaps even eliminate entirely the propaganda value to the party.

But the value of the Chinese space program isn't just propaganda. It's also being used as a play for potential power and profit. Jokes aside, military space power really is the dominant domain of the 21st century for conflict between superpowers, whether actual or merely planned for, like air power was in the 20th. I'm not going to adequately summarize military space policy in a HN comment, but basically the analogy to air dominance is very accurate: without satellites most of our modern war fighting capability is neutralized or made ineffective. Anti-satellite weaponry in its various forms is the new ICBM or stealth strike bomber. This isn't common knowledge outside of the military-industrial complex, but that's because our adversaries since the collapse of the USSR have had asymmetric capabilities with anti-satellite weapons consisting of camouflage tents and caves.

The one thing uniquely positive I have to say about about the Chinese space program leads to the final point to be made: profit. Whereas every other human space program is science and/or prestige based, China's is run by a country looking for an exploitative edge over major world powers, and bureaucrats within the party looking for ways to get internal leverage themselves. It turns out that the Moon and near-Earth asteroids are an abundant source of minerals and metals rare on Earth and can be mined for far less than you might naïvely think. So there are young turks within the party who are advocating for a cislunar economic exclusion zone. They are talking about violating the Outer Space Treaty of 1967's prohibition against claims of sovereignty over celestial bodies. The official plan is to construct a lunar base and perform resource exploration, WITHOUT international cooperation. Indeed, while NASA is working to get the Artimis Accords in place to reaffirm the existing cooperative model and try to build a collaborative effort to return to the Moon and go beyond, while opening up cislunar space to private resource exploration, China is laying the ground work for a land-grab. There are serious talks about a Chinese cislunar economic exclusion zone explicitly compared to the South China Sea, and estimated to be worth $10 trillion dollars by 2050 (crazy optimistic numbers, but that is the claim).

Regarding Belt and Road, I'm not sure what unique opinions I can offer. It's what most commentators have described it as recently: a debt trap to capture the best ports and enter into lucrative markets with the same sort of unequal treaties the europeans used against China in the 19th century. Tit-for-tat. At least some good infrastructure is being built though, particularly the roads through Central Asia which can't be monopolized in the same way that the deep-water ports they're building are.

Whether they leap frog the West depends more on whether we take proactive actions ourselves. SpaceX gives me reason to be optimistic, be we can't count our chickens before they've hatched.