It’s 2061. Earth’s surface is frozen solid. To escape an expanding Sun, the planet has embarked on a space voyage. Thousands of fusion engines propel it across our solar system. The further from the Sun it travels, the colder it gets. Half the population is dead, and survivors live in vast underground cities. But Earth must reach Alpha Centauri, where there is a perfectly good, nonexpanding Sun to allow us to get back to normal. “A journey of 4.5 light years begins with a single step,” as Confucius never said.
That’s the plot of the thoroughly bonkers and entirely enjoyable 2019 Chinese sci-fi movie The Wandering Earth. On release, it broke domestic box office records, and globally it has become the fifth-highest-grossing non-English-language film of all time. It is interesting on a number of levels, not least for what it says about soft power and how China projects its view of space.
The film’s director, Frant Gwo, says American sci-fi writers portray space as “the endless frontier”—a new horizon for humans to colonize. The Chinese narrative, he argues, is to improve life on Earth by using space as a resource. “When the Earth experiences this kind of crisis in Hollywood films, the hero always ventures out into space to find a new home, which is a very American approach—adventure, individualism,” Gwo told The Hollywood Reporter. “But in my film, we work as a team to take the whole Earth with us. This comes from Chinese cultural values—homeland, history, and continuity.”
It’s no surprise that The Wandering Earth has been enthusiastically embraced by the Chinese Communist Party—it was partially produced by the state-owned China Film Group Corporation, and the Ministry of Education recommended that it be aired in schools across the country. It also aired globally on Netflix, and the Foreign Ministry in Beijing did its bit for publicity, with spokesperson Hua Chunying telling journalists unprompted: “I know the hottest movie now is The Wandering Earth. I don’t know if you have watched or not. I’d recommend it.”
The Wandering Earth chimes nicely with Xi Jingping’s political agenda. Beijing knows that the US and other countries view its growing space capabilities as a threat. The movie allows it to suggest to foreign audiences that there is nothing to fear from its activities while simultaneously boosting domestic national pride and interest.
The Chinese president has long pushed the idea that China’s space program—which is entirely and directly controlled by the People’s Liberation Army—is no threat to anyone, that it seeks to work within international frameworks and for the good of humankind. But is that really true? And how will China’s stellar ambitions shape the future of global politics?
CHINA’S LEADERS see space as integral to their future plans. President Xi Jinping believes that China should have more of a leadership role in the world, and the country takes a “techno-nationalist” approach to modernization, believing it needs to be a technological leader to achieve its aims.
Chairman Mao took a view similar to Xi’s, and in the late 1950s China decided to invest in long-range missiles and space technology, despite being a poor and primarily agricultural country. Where America had Wernher von Braun and Russia had Sergei Korolev, the “father of Chinese rocketry” was Qian Xuesen, who spent decades in the United States at MIT and Caltech, where he was part of a team nicknamed “The Suicide Squad,” due to explosive attempts to build a rocket on campus.
During the Second World War, Qian worked on America’s response to Germany’s V-1 and V-2 rockets, and by the war’s end he was considered one of the foremost experts on jet propulsion. He even worked alongside von Braun on the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb. But that all counted for nothing. In 1949, as the Communist party was seizing control of China, the Americans accused Qian of being a communist sympathizer. He was stripped of his security clearance and put under house arrest. When he was finally allowed to leave the United States in 1955, he departed for China, telling reporters he would never set foot in the US again. He kept his word. It was America’s loss—and China’s gain.
While the communists were solidifying their control of China in the mid-20th century, the Americans and Soviets were spending billions in the Space Race. The Chinese were less concerned with the bragging rights for reaching milestones than with technological advances. The bigger and more far-reaching the rockets, the more Beijing feared that they could be militarized and used against China. So Qian was set to work training a generation of scientists who helped develop China’s nuclear bomb and the country’s Dongfeng ballistic missile system.
In 1956, in the spirit of “brotherly assistance,” the Soviets provided Qian with the blueprints for their R-1 rockets and sent specialists to Beijing to jump-start the Chinese ballistic program. A testing site was built in the Gobi Desert, and dozens of Chinese students were sent to Moscow for training. The Chinese wanted access to more modern rockets, but the Russians were reluctant to allow their very latest technology to be transferred to another country. The Chinese students resorted to copying restricted documents and tapping their instructors for knowledge.
By 1960, relations between China and Russia had deteriorated and cooperation was withdrawn. But Qian was able to use this rapid absorption of technical knowledge to oversee the launch of China’s first satellite and laid the foundations for the Chinese space program, as well as its ballistic missile technology. His story is a warning about rejecting outside scientific knowledge based on flimsy suspicions of intent. Former US Navy Secretary Dan Kimball said America’s treatment of Qian was “the stupidest thing this country ever did.”
In 1967, Mao gave the order to put a Chinese astronaut (taikonaut) into space, and the first candidates were chosen for training. But the program was canceled when the country was engulfed in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, during which many scientists were imprisoned or killed. Zhao Jiuzhang, the head of China’s satellite program, was denounced as a “counterrevolutionary” and beaten up by the Red Guards. He is thought to have drowned himself in Beijing’s Lake of Great Peace.
Despite these setbacks, in April 1970 China became the fifth country to put a satellite into orbit (after the Soviet Union, the US, France, and Japan). By the mid-1980s, China was launching satellites on a regular basis and offering its facilities to other countries. In 2003, China became the third country to send a human into space in what the China Daily called “The Great Leap Skyward.”
Then, in 2007, China deliberately destroyed one of its own weather satellites in a test of a spacebound missile known as a kinetic kill vehicle (KKV). Other countries were horrified by the profusion of space debris but impressed—and alarmed—that the Chinese had pulled off the equivalent of hitting a bullet with a bullet. Traveling at about 29,000 km/h, with just a second to go before impact, the KKV made three lightning-quick adjustments to its trajectory to hit the 2-meter long satellite square on.
Although Chinese officials denied that the test was part of a space arms race, there have been allegations that Beijing is powering ahead with research on ground-based directed-energy weapons designed to strike enemy targets in space. There are also reports of domed buildings with retractable roofs in remote parts of China that could be deployed to target satellites from the ground.
For the first few decades, China’s space program was primarily focused on its military ambitions, in addition to using satellites to monitor the weather and—as the country began to industrialize—decide where to put roads and railways. In this century, though, the Communist Party has started to use space as a way to signal China’s status as a military, technological, and economic leader.
IN EARLY 2022, Beijing published its space program “Perspective,” beginning with a quote from President Xi Jinping: “To explore the vast cosmos, develop the space industry, and build China into a space power is our eternal dream.” There are plans for next-generation manned spacecraft, a human lunar landing, an international research station on the moon, probing asteroids, and deep space exploration.
China’s Mission Vision is to “freely access, and efficiently use, and effectively manage space.” The “freely access” and “effectively manage” parts are a shot across the bow of the Americans and anyone attempting to deny China its place in the heavens. In 2019, the head of China’s Lunar Exploration Program, Ye Peijian, said: “If we don’t go there now even though we are capable of doing so, then we will be blamed by our descendants. If others go there, then they will take over, and you won’t be able to go even if you want to. This is reason enough.”
The document is explicit in its call for the United Nations to play a central role “in managing outer space affairs.” It points out that since 2016 China has signed space agreements or memoranda of understanding with 19 countries and regions and four international organizations, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, South Africa, and Thailand. It emphasizes cooperation with the European Space Agency, Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands. It trumpets that it has provided satellite launches for a range of countries and opened its facilities to developing states such as Laos and Myanmar.
This is all pushback against what Beijing sees as the US trying to dominate governance of space. Over the years, there have been efforts to collaborate with America. In early 1984, President Reagan offered a place on the US Space Shuttle to a taikonaut. In 1986, a group of Chinese scientists were due to visit Houston’s Manned Spacecraft Center as part of the preparations, but the visit was canceled after the Challenger space shuttle exploded.
In 2011, the United States Congress passed the Wolf Amendment, which limits NASA’s ability to cooperate with Chinese organizations and scientists. As a result, China has been frozen out of the Artemis Accords, a nonbinding treaty that seeks to govern peaceful space exploration. The rationale of Republican congressperson Frank Wolf was that the relationship between space exploration, technological advances, and China’s military was such that the US could not risk collaboration with its growing rival. Specifically, the concern was about the possibility of intellectual property theft from NASA computers and joint US-Chinese research, which Beijing was applying to sensitive military technologies, including ballistic missiles.
Chinese hackers are known to have briefly gained entry to computer systems at the Department of Defense, the office of the Secretary of Defense, the US Naval War College, the Pentagon, a nuclear weapons laboratory, and the White House. More traditional espionage activity has also been uncovered. In 2008, Shu Quan-sheng, an American physicist living in Virginia, was convicted of transferring information about the liquid hydrogen tanks of a US rocket to Beijing. In 2010, Dongfan Chung, a former engineer at Boeing, was convicted of providing China with more than 300,000 pages of sensitive information, including data about the US Space Shuttle.
China has reacted to being shut out by constructing a rival to the International Space Station, forming strategic scientific relationships with a host of countries, and building a domestic space industry that looks at least as cutting-edge as that of the US, all without input or monitoring from the Americans.
In 2014, China completed its new, coastal spaceport at Wenchang, specifically for the larger-diameter Changzheng rockets, which need to be launched over water. In 2016, two taikonauts spent a month on board the Tiangong 2 space station after their craft successfully docked. In 2019, China broke new ground when the uncrewed Chang’e 4 became the first spacecraft to land on the far side of the moon, and in 2020 the final BeiDou satellite was put into position, completing a navigation network to challenge the American-owned Global Positioning System (GPS).
But perhaps the biggest milestone in the past decade was orbiting, landing, and then deploying a rover on Mars. The Tianwen-1 mission arrived at the planet in February 2021 and spent three months searching for the right location to touch down. On May 14, the lander left the orbiting vehicle and made a soft landing. The Zhurong (God of Fire) rover was then released to conduct surveys of Martian geology, search for water, and beam back sound and vision.
All of this is a source of great pride in China and is interwoven with the mythology of the Communist Party. China’s Changzheng (Long March) rockets are named after a famous military retreat during the Chinese civil war in 1934–5, when the Red Army covered 9,000 kilometers over rugged terrain. It helped Mao come to power and go on to defeat the anti-communist forces. It is part of the foundation myths of the Chinese Communist Party and is often used as an example of heroic sacrifice to achieve greatness. To use the term for the rockets propelling China to greatness in space is deeply symbolic.
In recent years, China has softened some of its public exhortations about the superiority of communism and has instead embraced elements of nationalism and myth from an older historical collective memory. This is reflected in the naming of space missions and equipment. The uncrewed craft that orbited the moon in 2007 was called the Chang’e 1 after a beautiful fairy who, in Chinese folklore, stole the elixir of immortality from her husband, drank it, flew to the moon, and became a celestial goddess. Meanwhile, on board Space Station Tiangong, taikonauts, who travel to it in a Shenzhou (“Divine Vessel”) capsule, can thank their lucky stars they are in the “Heavenly Palace,” named after the residence of the Celestial Ruler who holds supreme authority over the universe in Chinese mythology.
The word “taikonaut” is a mixture of Mandarin and Greek, from taikong, meaning “cosmos,” and naut, Greek for “sailor.” These names are important. They signal to the world that space is not just the domain of Americans and Europeans, and that for every Artemis there is a Chang’e.
IN 1995, a Chinese rocket exploded after takeoff and killed at least six people on the ground. The exact details of what happened are still unknown—a reminder that China remains in many ways a closed society. Despite that legacy of secrecy, however, it’s now common knowledge that the country’s launch capacities are expanding.
The Chinese National Space Administration (CSNA) now has several launch sites across the country, from the Taiyuan facility in the Gobi Desert, which launches some of China’s weather satellites but is also part of its intercontinental ballistic missile system, to the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan province and the more modern Wenchang Space Launch Site on the South China Sea island of Hainan, which is used to get taikonauts to the Chinese space station and for longer uncrewed missions.
A new launch facility is being completed in the eastern port city of Ningbo, about two and a half hours’ drive from Shanghai. Within a few years, it is expected to be launching 100 commercial rockets a year in what are called “quick-fire” liftoffs. Like the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Ningbo is on the coast, meaning rockets do not have to fly over land, and it has a favorable latitude for breaking out of the atmosphere quickly.
Local officials want Ningbo to be known as China’s Space City. It’s only a few miles from a cluster of commercial launch industries near the mouth of the Yangtze River, with access to a huge port and other space-focused industries in Shanghai. The country’s largest car manufacturer, Geely, has its headquarters there and is investing heavily in satellite design and aerospace-related industries. In 2022, it used the Xichang facility to launch nine of its own satellites into low Earth orbit as the first stage of a network to provide more accurate navigation for autonomous vehicles.
This is all part of the growing commercial space industry in China. It remains behind the US in terms of private funding, but companies are eager to invest, especially in launching satellites before low Earth orbit gets too crowded. The CCP began to encourage private investment in 2014, but, as with all Chinese enterprises, the link with the state is stronger than in most countries. There are now more than 100 private space-related companies in China, but many are spinoffs from the government sector. For example, the rocket manufacturer ExPace, based in Wuhan’s Space Industry complex, is a subsidiary of the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation.
Others have more distance from the state: i-Space, for example, was the first private Chinese company to achieve orbit when it launched its Hyperbola-1 rocket in 2019. However, this was followed by two failures in 2021. Others have also experienced serious setbacks. To help counter this, the government is slowly allowing the transfer of previously restricted state technology and expertise into the sector as part of a national strategy of civil-military fusion. This links the state, private enterprise, and the country’s top research universities in clusters of technological excellence in a more formal manner than in the US. In a very competitive market, some of the new companies are bound to fail, but what is equally sure is that some will rise to become powerful national, and likely global, players.
In all of this, China will be helped by a huge, dynamic workforce. Long-term demographic problems loom, but for now the country can still turn out huge numbers of scientists and engineers—the Beijing Aeronautical Institute alone has 23,000 students. Each year of this century, China has increased the number of engineers who graduate, while the US has seen a year-on-year decrease.
In the near future, Beijing intends to further develop its BeiDou Navigation Satellite System, having seen the $1.4 trillion boost GPS has given to the US economy since the mid-1980s. American farmers use it to plan the best use of their land, delivery services are steered more efficiently through cities, financial institutions can timestamp transactions, and ship owners can track their fleets. BeiDou’s encrypted military application is more accurate than the civilian version and will be used to monitor the movements of the PLA and the armed forces of other countries.
China also intends to launch at least 1,000 satellites over the next decade. It will increasingly offer its services to developing countries that cannot afford to launch rockets or build satellites of their own. This will be used to cement bilateral ties in an attempt to pull states away from the US. Satellites used for scientific discoveries are likely to have some notable triumphs to rival those of the Hard X-Ray Modulation Telescope, China’s first x-ray astronomy satellite, which observes black holes and has discovered the strongest magnetic field in the universe.
Loftier goals include landing on passing asteroids to mine them for the riches therein. Some of these rocks are tens of kilometers wide and contain billions of dollars’ worth of the metals required for 21st-century technology. One of China’s many startup companies, Origin Space, has already launched a robot prototype to capture and destroy space debris and intends to develop it to be able to mine asteroids.
There’s also the aim of sending another probe to Mars. Just getting there is hard enough, but China, along with the US and the European Space Agency, is working on plans to dig up soil and rock samples and get them back to Earth. The idea is to eventually send probes to Jupiter and Saturn.
But perhaps the project with the greatest political significance is China’s coming moon landings. In 2021, China and Russia signed a memorandum of understanding that they will jointly build a base on the moon called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). They envisage three phases: first, reconnaissance up to 2026, including three crewed missions; then a landing on the Moon; and finally a “returning.” The south pole has been earmarked because its icy craters are a potential source of water.
When China landed a noncrewed craft on the far side of the moon in 2019, it planted the Chinese flag on the surface and began digging for rocks in a region it is considering using as a base. Some reports suggest China wants a permanent presence on the moon as early as 2028, but this seems beyond ambitious; 2030 is more realistic, and even that would be impressive.
The first structure built will enable mining to extract resources that will allow the base to grow—central to this is water, hence the south pole. Moscow and Beijing say they intend the base to be fully open by 2035; the American-led Artemis project is more vague about its timetable.
Building a base on the moon will capture a generation’s imagination in the way the 1969 moon landings did. Flowing from that will be an appreciation of the technological brilliance and, equally importantly, resolve, of the nation or nations who do it first. This is not just about “planting a flag”: It’s about seizing the “high frontier” for both military and commercial advantage. The prizes are the moon’s potential riches and the ability to use it as a gravitational point to deploy military satellites that would be difficult for competitors to detect.
FURTHER CLAIMS on the “geography” of space will be made as the decade progresses. China is already the only country operating its own space station, the Tiangong 3. It doesn’t make headlines in the way a moon base will, but in astro-political terms, having the only sovereign station is quite a statement—the better known ISS is a “cooperative program” involving European countries, Japan, Russia, the US, and Canada.
The Tiangong is owned and operated solely by China and is expected to be in service up to about 2037. Versions 1 and 2, built between 2011 and 2016, were test versions for the third, which is almost three times heavier and much bigger—although it only has three modules, whereas the ISS has 16. On board, taikonauts are researching space medicine, biotechnology, microgravity combustion, fluid physics, 3D printing, robotics, directed energy beams, and artificial intelligence.
As the ISS approaches decommissioning, by 2030 at the latest, a small window may open for China. The Artemis program includes the Lunar Gateway—a small station orbiting the moon and acting as a hub to allow spaceships, crews, landing modules, and rovers to resupply during frequent trips. But any serious delays in building the Gateway will leave the Tiangong as the only place open for guests, and that will be a demonstration of China’s hospitality, spirit of cooperation, and leadership. Beijing has already said it hopes to host visits by international astronauts and wants to work “with all countries in the world committed to the peaceful use of outer space.”
China and the US look destined to spend the next decade mostly isolated from each other with regard to high-tech science and engineering, two areas that are crucial to addressing the challenges humanity faces on Earth and in that most hostile of environments, space. Cooperation is possible. Replacing the Wolf Amendment with something less like a sledgehammer would help. And even as that is worked out, because the amendment is specific to NASA, the US Departments of Defense and State have room to explore bilateral avenues of mutual benefit.
Détente between the Americans and Soviets was helped by the Soyuz/Apollo “handshake in space.” Following the end of the Cold War, collaboration between Russia and the US on the ISS was a bridge on which to at least try to build a better relationship. The return to the moon offers a similar opportunity for the US and China. But whether either side is able or willing to make that leap into space might depend on their relationship on Earth.
Tim Marshall is the author of The Future of Geography: How Power and Politics In Space Will Change Our World (out April 27, £20, Elliott & Thompson)
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
