Nothing John says is true. No fucking way is China ahead of us on it, or they wouldn't be constantly stealing our shit.
What Wu is saying isn't even a thing that exists. There's no such thing as "quantum encryption." It has long been recognised you can securely exchange a key with a remote party using quantum entanglement, and it's even been demonstrated. That's not encryption though, it's exploiting a physical property. In fact, you could argue that it's almost the opposite of encryption. You're basically sending a symmetric key in cleartext but over a channel that contains foolproof notification of eavesdroppers. In the case of a ciphered key exchange, you're sending an encrypted key over a completely untrusted channel in the knowledge your message may be intercepted but that the key can't be recovered in time for that recovery to be meaningful.
Quantum computers have theoretical implications for current asymmetric ciphers that use certain types of trapdoor function to provide their security. In particular, relying on prime factorisation being a hard problem. Reality has yet to catch up with theory though, I think it's been demonstrated that a quantum computer can factorise a 3 digit decimal number now, but that's a bit of a way from a 2048 bit number. In fact, and I'm well aware that this could go down as one of those "no one will need more than 1MB of RAM" statements, I'm quietly convinced that quantum computers can't be scaled. In any event, we're well on top of the problem and we have a whole slew of candidates for trapdoor functions that aren't computable on quantum computers, it being a limitation that a quantum computer is not Turing complete and can only tackle probabilistic algorithms like primality testing.
In the meantime, AES has proved remarkably resistant to any actual cryptographic results that significantly reduce its security. While the best attack on AES is more or less just brute force there seems no hurry to replace it, though I'm not completely au fait with whether key sizes above 256 bits would actually provide equivalent increases in security. It could be that eventually it's just aged out by how long it takes to brute force keys, which would be the case with DES even if it weren't broken six ways from sunday. Quantum computing has no significant effects on the security of AES.
One way you can tell Wu has no fucking clue what she's talking about is that she calls AES a "protocol." I wonder if she even has a clear idea what the word protocol means. AES is an encryption algorithm.
