Smiling Like Venus, Wary Like Mars (Scientific and Military Power

BEIJING - There is no space race or cold war, but China's success in sending an astronaut into orbit last week is a reminder that any modern aspirant to world power down on Earth ultimately ends up in space. The reasons are ego and potential plunder, but also the fact that the world's most powerful nations fear that space could one day be a setting for war.

If that sounds like science fiction, consider this passage: "We know from history that every medium - air, land and sea - has seen conflict. Reality indicates that space will be no different."

The passage comes from the 2001 report of a panel appointed by Congress and led by Mr. Rumsfeld, who was not yet defense secretary. The commission, which studied space-related national defense issues, called for a greater military presence in space and warned of attacks on satellites that could be equal to a "space Pearl Harbor."

For decades, the principal players in space, the United States and the former Soviet Union, have pursued parallel tracks. They have launched spy satellites and other space-faring military hardware. But each has portrayed its manned space programs as civilian endeavors more about scientific achievement, national pride and mankind's desire to explore the cosmos.

China is following a similar playbook. It has military communications and imaging satellites and is reportedly developing ground-based lasers capable of attacking satellites. Yet China's leaders insisted that their Shenzhou 5 mission was not a military venture. It was about, yes, scientific achievement, national pride and mankind's desire to explore the cosmos.

Not that any of the Big Three space-faring nations really trust the other two when it comes to space. Many officials in Washington, which has already restricted some technology transfers to China, are particularly leery of China's space ambitions. By contrast, the Chinese believe America has unfairly tried to impede their civilian efforts to develop a space program and also to join the International Space Station.

Notwithstanding such a rivalry, analysts agree that China's ambitions in space are hardly limited to military goals. Chinese leaders hope to achieve the same sort of technological advances from the continued development of a manned space program that the United States has already reaped.

"Development of space hardware and know-how for the manned programs will certainly push the Chinese rapidly up the learning curve in everything from materials to computing power to systems engineering, as the Apollo program did for the United States," Joan Johnson-Freese, an expert on the Chinese space program at the Naval War College in Rhode Island, wrote in an academic paper.

Ms. Johnson-Freese pointed out that these breakthroughs often have both civilian and military applications. She noted that China launched a new military reconnaissance satellite last January that was based on technology used in a similar civilian satellite.

It was the awesome display of military technology presented by the United States first in the 1991 Persian Gulf war that helped prod China into renewing its efforts in space. In 1992, President Jiang Zemin initiated the manned space program. Last week, ordinary Chinese citizens speaking in random interviews said the technical sophistication displayed by the American military in the recent Iraq war had convinced them that China, too, must become a scientific power.

Chinese historians note that foreign invaders were able to best China during the 19th and early 20th centuries. These invaders, the historians say, had better, more sophisticated weapons. As China now methodically pursues its goal of becoming a world power equal to the United States, most analysts agree that it is neither looking nor preparing for a major war. For now, they say, China wants regional stability so that it can keep developing its economy and further lift its people's living standards.

But if war does break out someday, and should it occur in space, China apparently wants to be ready.

Andrew Roberts: China's century - China's space shot is a warning for the West***"Whether you like it or not, history is on our side," a threatening Nikita Khrushchev warned a group of Western diplomats in Moscow in 1956, adding: "We will bury you." Two events last week should warn us that, although the Soviet Union never succeeded in burying the West, Communist China might. For if history is on anyone's side at the moment, it seems to be moving in favour of Beijing's totalitarian rulers.

The astronaut Yang Liwei orbited the earth 14 times in 21 hours on Wednesday, adding China to the elite club of America and Russia as the only three powers to have undertaken manned space exploration. By 2010 China hopes, in the words of its chief space scientist, Ouyang Ziyuan, to "set up a base on the Moon and mine its riches for the benefit of humanity". Since China's entire space programme is controlled by the People's Liberation Army (PLA), it is unlikely that humanity's benefit is high on China's agenda. As Lt-Gen Edward Anderson, the deputy commander of US Northern Command, has put it: "It will not be long before space becomes a battleground."

Also last week, the banking colossus HSBC announced that 4,000 British jobs are to be lost when it closes its processing and call centre operations in Birmingham, Swansea, Sheffield and Brentwood. Those jobs will now go to China, India and Malaysia, where labour costs are far lower. Unlike the space mission, the HSBC news was confined to the back pages, but its long-term implications are no less momentous; service-sector as well as manufacturing jobs are migrating east.

Napoleon called China "a sleeping giant", and predicted that "When she awakes she will shake the world". Well, now China is wide awake, and armed with an economy that is widely expected to outgrow that of the US by 2025. Moreover, she is casting baleful stares at the English-speaking civilisation that she believes kept her backward in the days of Western imperialism. The Second Boxer Rising has begun, but this time it is being fought on the battlefield of trade. (Beijing's trade surplus with the US now stands at $100 billion.) China's rulers are utterly ruthless; she has an army of 2.3 million men; her neighbours are understandably fearful; and she nurses proud but wounded national ambitions. It is high time that we woke up to the threat that an awakened Chinese empire poses to our present global hegemony.***

Derbyshire: SORRY STATE (Communist, Nationalist, and Dangerous)***OBSTACLES TO EMPIRE - The grand project of restoring and Sinifying the Manchu dominions has unfortunately met three stumbling blocks. The first was Outer Mongolia, from which the Chinese garrison was expelled following the collapse of Manchu rule. The country declared independence in 1921 under Soviet auspices, and that independence was recognized by Chiang Kai-shek's government in 1945, in return for Soviet recognition of themselves as the "the Central Government of China." Mao seems not to have been very happy about this. In 1954, he asked the Soviets to "return" Outer Mongolia. I do not know the position of China's current government towards Outer Mongolia, but I should not be surprised to learn that somewhere in the filling cabinets of China's defense ministry is a detailed plan for restoring Outer Mongolia to the warm embrace of the Motherland, as soon as a suitable opportunity presents itself.

The second is Taiwan. No Chinese Imperial dynasty paid the least attention to Taiwan, or bothered to claim it. The Manchus did, though, in 1683, and ruled it in a desultory way, as a prefecture of Fujian Province, until 1887, when it was upgraded to a province in its own right. Eight years later it was ceded to Japan, whose property it remained until 1945. In its entire history, it has been ruled by Chinese people seated in China's capital for less than four years. China's current attitudes to Taiwan are, I think, pretty well known.

And the third stumbling block to the restoration of China's greatness is…….the United States. To the modern Chinese way of thinking, China's proper sphere of influence encompasses all of East Asia and the western Pacific. This does not mean that they necessarily want to invade and subjugate all the nations of that region, though they certainly do want to do just that to Taiwan and some groups of smaller islands. For Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Micronesia, etc., the old imperial-suzerainty model would do well enough, at least in the short term. These places could conduct their own internal affairs, so long as they acknowledged the overlordship of Beijing, and, above all, did not enter into alliances, nor even close friendships, with other powers.

Which, of course, too many of them have done, the competitor power in every case being the U.S. It is impossible to overstate how angry it makes the Chinese to think about all those American troops in Japan, Korea, and Guam, together with the U.S. Seventh Fleet steaming up and down in "Chinese" waters, and electronic reconnaissance planes like the EP-3 brought down on April 1 operating within listening distance of the mainland. If you tackle Chinese people on this, they usually say:

"How would you feel if there were Chinese troops in Mexico and Jamaica, and Chinese planes flying up and down your coasts?" Leaving aside the fact that front companies for the Beijing regime now control both ends of the Panama Canal, as well as Freeport in the Bahamas, the answer is that the United States is a democracy of free people, whose government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, so that the wider America's influence spreads, the better for humanity: while China is a corrupt, brutish, and lawless despotism, the close containment of which is a pressing interest for the whole human race. One cannot, of course, expect Chinese people to be very receptive to this answer.

Or, indeed, to anything much we have to say on the subject of their increasing militant and assertive nationalism. We simply have no leverage here. It is no use trying to pretend that this is the face-saving ideology of a small leadership group, forced on an unwilling populace at gunpoint. The Chinese people respond eagerly to these ultra-nationalist appeals: That is precisely why the leadership makes them. Resentment of the U.S., and a determination to enforce Chinese hegemony in Asia, are well-nigh universal among modern mainland Chinese. These emotions trump any desire for constitutional government, however much people dislike the current regime for its corruption and incompetence. Find a mainlander, preferably one under the age of thirty, and ask him which of the following he would prefer: for the Communists to stay in power indefinitely, unreformed, but in full control of the "three T's" (Tibet, Turkestan, Taiwan); or a democratic, constitutional government without the three T's. His answer will depress you. You can even try this unhappy little experiment with dissidents: same answer.

Is there anything we can do about all this? One thing only. We must understand clearly that there will be lasting peace in East Asia when, and only when, China abandons her atavistic fantasies of imperial hegemony, withdraws her armies from the 2 million square miles of other people's territory they currently occupy, and gets herself a democratic government under a rule of law. Until that day comes, if it ever does, the danger of war will be a constant in relations between China and the world beyond the Wall, as recent events in the South China Sea have illustrated. Free nations, under the indispensable leadership of the United States, must in the meantime struggle to maintain peace, using the one, single, and only method that wretched humanity, in all its millennia of experience, has so far been able to devise for that purpose: Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum. ***

China reaches for the stars*** The brief successful flight of taikonaut Yang Liwei has put China up there with the world's two superpowers as a space-voyaging nation. No matter that it comes so long after the pioneering flights of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and American astronaut Alan Shepherd in 1961. The space race is not a sprint, or one where the winner is always the one first out of the blocks. In space, the first achievement is to get to the starting line.

Nor does it matter by what system of government - or at what expense to a nation's people - such achievements are produced. The Soviet Union and the United States sought to draft their space triumphs into the service of ideology. But when the rest of the world looked skyward, uncomplicated awe came before any calculation of the merits of the rival systems, communism and capitalism, which underpinned these achievements.

In China's case it is a combination - of the authoritarianism of its communist government and the new wealth and technological capacity produced by its late embrace of capitalism - which has delivered its first space triumph. For further such developments this new wealth and technological capacity, built on trade with the west, is crucial.

Trade will head the agenda when the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, visits Australia next week. China's annual exports to Australia are running at $14 billion and Australia's exports to China at about $9 billion. The picture of China's trade with the US is similar. In the first eight months of this year the China-US trade gap widened in China's favour to $US77 billion ($130 billion), far exceeding America's $US43 billion trade deficit with Japan for the same period.

Spending on China's space ambitions is driven by more than a desire for international prestige. Behind the bright and shining scientific justifications there is the more sombre purpose of defensive security, if not military superiority. Coming late to the nuclear club, in 1964, did not deny China influence in it. Nor does coming late to manned space flight diminish either the prestige attached to that achievement or its potential military implications, beyond China's already formidable capacity.

In the Cold War rockets propelled cosmonauts and astronauts into space - and became the primary delivery system for nuclear weapons. China has only now put a man in space, but for some time has had intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the heartland of the US. The flight of the Shenzhou V space capsule potentially represents the first step towards developing a Chinese military capacity in space. If the US presses on with its space-based missile defence system, it could be China, rather than Russia, which eventually challenges its superiority in that field.

For now, China is still a long way from matching the space technology of Russia, much less America's. This first step does, however, affirm the possibility of future greatness. It changes the way the Chinese people see their future. In time, it will change the way the rest of the world sees China. ***

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