Those are bold words–and for a space program that just had its first successful unmanned launch in 1999, an equally bold schedule. But the natural question for many outsiders in the West is simply: why bother? What’s the big deal about being third in space, behind Washington and Moscow? Yes, missiles and rocket launches have a lot in common, but if you are talking about advancements in military technology, most don’t require a manned space program. Even bullish aerospace expert Ye confesses that China’s goal of putting a man on the moon will be, er, “astronomically expensive.” At a time when Beijing is scrambling to feed and house hundreds of millions of poor farmers and laid-off workers, such a drain on the national income seems extravagant at best.
Although the celestial contest among the Great Powers has quieted, China’s space race is really a battle with its own demons. Chinese citizens see enormous prestige in pursuing the cosmos. It’s a chance for the country to recapture its lost legacy of technological mastery and innovation. The central government’s first white paper on space exploration, published in 2000, tapped into these feelings, reminding readers that China’s invention of gunpowder was really the “embryo of modern space rockets.”
The history of China’s past humiliations at the hands of foreign imperialists is an added incentive. For about two centuries, the Chinese Empire lost out on Western and Japanese contests for colonies. But China’s quest for respect may do more to change the Middle Kingdom than the Milky Way. During the 1950s and ’60s, Mao Zedong was convinced that Washington or Moscow would try to bomb Beijing’s strategic facilities, so they were hidden in the country’s interior. Like everything dominated by the military, China’s space program–and the industries that support it–are cloaked in secrecy. But that may soon change. The country’s aerospace projects, including the fast-growing commercial launch industry, compose “one of the most dynamic sectors in China’s economy,” says Evan Medeiros of the Rand Corp.
The Chinese scientific community has been abuzz with talk of a Cape Canaveral-style space center on the far-southern island of Hainan. Plans envisage a mostly civilian launch site “open to the international community,” as local media put it–meaning built with less paranoid secrecy than current installations.
With or without the Hainan complex, China’s aerospace program is being lured inevitably toward the outside world–and greater transparency. To be sure, big mysteries remain, including the space program’s budget. But market reforms–and economic necessity–are chipping away at this last, most secret frontier in China’s state-owned industrial empire. “We’ll elevate our opening of strategic industries to a new level,” says Minister Liu Jibin, head of the Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense.
China’s leaders–who are always seeking ways to shore up the regime’s shaky legitimacy–are fully aware how potent a symbol the space program is for the Chinese people. President Jiang Zemin seems intent on making the project a pillar of his own legacy, much the way Mao made China’s first nuclear detonation a personal triumph. Only a few officials dare confess privately the program is little more than “a feel-good factor,” as one calls it, for the masses.
With China’s fourth unmanned space launch expected any day now, the party propaganda machine has been in full swing promoting its 14 astronauts-in-training. Each man is “made of a toughness ordinary people can only begin to imagine,” says chief spacecraft designer Liu Zongying. Maybe. But it remains to be seen just what benefits come along for Beijing in having the “right stuff.”
