Which makes sense as they had less access to new technologies, and scaling issues were very hard in the early days.

But I'm not quite sure how that's relevant to the article...

Both economies have massive drug industries and China in particular has advanced manufacturing processes for decades. I suspect they made an economic/risk decision and will be reviewing it in the light of mRNA production lead time.

We're way beyond lysenko. China has no intellectual or political baggage in vaccine theory or bio engineering.

it's actually more difficult to produce inactivated vaccine at mass scale than mRNA vaccine, which is the reason why they were producing mRNA vaccines and not the old school safe tested ones