Dear Sirs,
This is my first reply (and only my second post!) so please bear with me. I read that article off the website of the people's daily some time ago. The gist of it is that China has decided to run a parallel experimental tokamak program in addition to their participation in ITER (the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor at Cadarache, France).
It is not a working fusion power reactor, very far from it. The configuration, (that of the tokamak) is in fact Soviet in origin, designed by Andrei Sakharov and Igor Tamm (if I'm not mistaken). In this design the ionized gases (the plasma) serve as the secondary of a transformer and are heated by the induced currents. It has proven to be the most promising of thermonuclear designs (constrast this with the Western desings it replaced like the Stellarator).
Doubtless this experiment (as any well-designed experiment should), serves several purposes; first, it allows China to familiarize itself with the design, materials and construction of a thermonuclear reactor; second, it allows the study of plasma dynamics (a very complicated and difficult field) in the reactor environment; third, it introduces to China the use of Superconducting Maganets in the field coils and fourth, it provides independant validation of the designs, calculations and criteria established for ITER.
From the pictures, clearly it is at least an order of magnitude (around 10x) smaller than ITER, thus is a much more modest effort, but probably sufficient given China's existing financial and technological constraints. The lesson here is to walk before you run.
The "Artificial Sun" comparison is unfortunate and misleading as the sun itself operates on an entirely different principle. In it's core the sun fuses light hydrogen (protium) together to form helium via a complex catalyzed fusion reaction (i.e. via many nuclear intermediary reactions). This was first explained by Hans Bethe for which he won the Nobel prize.
Viewed as a fusion reactor the sun uses gravity to confine its plasma, that is not an option available to us. Also, the reaction takes place a extremely high pressures, another option not available to us (as the energy release would be like a bomb). Lastly the sun's thermonuclear reaction time is very long, and seems large due to vast quantity of material reacting.
The chief characteristics of modern thermonuclear reactors can be summarized as, magnetic confinement of the plasma, low plasma densities, long plasma confinement periods, and of course much higher plasma temperatures than in the sun.
As to the availability of heavy hydrogen, China has long been able to produce it. In fact it inadvertantly sold some to India, by mistake. It also has tritium production reactors like the ones the USA operates.
Lastly before I end my post, I would like to point out an interesting characteristic of the fusion reaction we are relying on... that in the D-D (deuterium-deuterium) and D-T (deuterium-tritium) reactions, most of the energy released (unlike that in a fission reactor) is in the incident neutron, (some 85%) and not in the fusion product itself. So to capture the energy, you must slow the neutron
