EAST is merely one of a whole bunch of fusion projects. ITER, Stellarator, Lockheed has a small footprint reactor in development, Tokamak in the UK, the list is long and.. hey, even includes the tax and spend liberals here in the States.
Just because the article only focuses on China China China doesn't mean they're somehow solely at the vanguard of fusion research.
And Headset, cold fusion is, as of now, total quackery. The fusion reactions in something like a Tokamak reactor are held in space by heat resistant superconducting magnets. Plasma needs to be in the 100+ million K range for nuclei to fuse.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/china-built-artificial-sun-its-13588517