The headline is pretty scary: “China’s Quantum Computer Scientists Crack Military-Grade Encryption.” No, it’s not true. This debunking saved me the trouble of writing one. It all seems to have come from this news article, which wasn’t bad but was taken wildly out of proportion. Cryptography is safe, and will be for a long time EDITED TO ADD (11/3): Really good explainer from Dan Goodin.
The original article smelled wrong when they claimed to have broken AES. Thankfully, Bruce Schneier is far more authoritative than I ever will be and gives a short and succinct list of links to debunkings of this.