Posted on 10/19/2003 11:22:16 AM PDT by anymouse
The creator of the original "Star Trek" made his 23rd century crew diverse: It had an African communications officer, a Scottish chief engineer, a Russian navigator, a Japanese helmsman — and, of course, a Vulcan science officer.
But on the bridge of the USS Enterprise, when the show debuted in 1966, a Chinese was nowhere to be found. And that was hardly surprising.
China then was, to much of the Western world, a communist menace led by an erratic despot. With the Vietnam War escalating, few Americans captivated by the brushed-metal modernism of spaceflight could — or wanted to — imagine Red China riding the stars.
No more. By bringing "taikonaut" Yang Liwei safely home from orbit, China's communists staged the most compelling production of their 54 years in power. Because the Shenzhou 5 mission, while grounded in science and the military, was at heart pure Hollywood blockbuster.
"China's manned `Star Trek' signals a brighter future," the state-controlled newspaper China Daily enthused.
The space shot also represented a cultural collision — between a past saturated with ideological propaganda and a present that is increasingly capitalist, grounded in the global mass-media and videogame monoculture that so many young Chinese are embracing.
The week left no doubt that China has learned from the pirated DVDs of "Independence Day" and "Red Planet" that sell cheaply on its streets. High production values, unusual even for the increasingly modern China Central Television, began upon takeoff.
Stirring symphonies of drums, strings and trumpets sounded over graphics resembling screen shots from Microsoft's Flight Simulator. But with a few notes changed, they would have been the fanfares from "Star Wars," "Superman II" and "Star Trek: Voyager (news - Y! TV)."
For a dictatorship worried about its image among its increasingly savvy people, this is entirely in keeping with China's approach to its decade-old space program.
There was a bit of hesitation in the hours before the launch when plans to broadcast it live were scrapped abruptly without explanation. That lent credence to speculation that the government — or, more likely, the military — was worried about a PR disaster if things went wrong.
But within minutes of the successful launch, the barrage of graphics and visuals commenced, and it stayed right on message: China matters. China is admirable. China is as good and as powerful and as modern as anyone — particularly the United States.
On Friday, the government pointedly invoked its first atomic bomb test in 1964 — 39 years to the day before Shenzhou 5 landed — and noted how it "shocked the rest of the world." Another report cited "China's homemade spacecraft," as if Grandma had whipped it up from scratch. In reality, it's based on the Russian Soyuz model, albeit with major modifications.
Even the term "taikonaut" fit nicely into the production. Americans have their astronauts, Russians their cosmonauts, and now the word the Beijing government is deploying for international consumption plays off "taikong," the Chinese word for space.
All this is little surprise. These days, no one does public spectacle like China's communists, who mastered it decades ago.
This is the government that taught North Korea (news - web sites) how to get 50,000 people in a stadium to hold up cards and form giant pictures of their dictator. These leaders are the ideological descendants of Mao, who stage-managed rallies of a million Red Guards chanting in Tiananmen Square in stunning synchronicity while waving his Little Red Book.
The propaganda has grown ever slicker in the 25 years since Deng Xiaoping launched what would become the "socialist market economy." A couple of years back, for example, some old standards from the Communist Party songbook were retooled — for karaoke bars.
The premise still is communism, but the ideology is a strange mix of nationalism and the profit motive.
More than once, officials cited the "socialist market economy" as a factor in their space saga. And one snippet of video showing children in astronaut suits frolicking in zero gravity wasn't government propaganda at all; it was a new milk commercial.
And Yang: Just by doing his job, he became the perfect leading man, the latest anonymous Chinese plucked from the masses and anointed "space hero." He's seen phoning home from orbit, promising to do well, praising the motherland over and over.
Little is known about him, and that's convenient: Like Lei Feng, the obscure soldier killed in an accident in the 1960s and built into a party legend, Yang is a vessel for anything that government and people can dream up.
Throughout the week, the government has been repeating a tale of a Ming Dynasty dreamer named Wan Hu, who tied gunpowder-packed bamboo tubes to a chair some 500 years ago and tried to launch himself into space. It exploded and he was killed.
Now government statements promise the space program will succeed where Wan failed — exploiting the "remaining frontier of outer space and furthering the Chinese cause."
As the weekend began, on state television stations, the carefully calibrated picture show that was Shenzhou 5 was still screening for China's people. Video that Yang took of the Earth in space was rolling.
For one week in this nation, thanks to a complex blend of propaganda and patriotism, the final frontier was finally, resoundingly Chinese.
This has been stated 1000s of times on FR, and it is wrong.
Fortunately, it takes more than good PR to conquer a frontier. The Chinese have a long way to go before they have anything going on up there BUT PR.
The contrast is stark between the relatively open space program of the United States - it is cooperating with 15 countries on the International Space Station - and China's clandestine approach.
Sending a man into space is a notable achievement. But this feat should not obscure the important political differences that continue to divide China from the United States. Amid calls for joint scientific or commercial ventures in space to improve Chinese-American relations, officials in Washington should consider what kind of cooperation is appropriate with a regime that does not share the United States' tradition of freedom and respect for human rights.***
Not so, but even if it were true, so what? That still doesn't excuse America's failing lack of interest in technical education and losing a commanding lead in science and technology. We have been resting on our laurels, and what America accomplished is obviously something anybody can eventually accomplish.
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