According to Jianwei PAN, a professor at the CAS University of Science and Technology of China, china will launch a satellite for related experiments in 2016, in view of an Asia-Europe intercontinental quantum communication network by 2020 and a global network by 2030. The transmission of quantum states from one place to another is an important technology for quantum cryptography, a way of creating „unbreakable“ messages
CAS news release, Nov. 3, 2014