BEIJING (AP) - Training in secret, a dozen fighter pilots are getting ready to make history as China's first astronauts.
Two attended Russia's cosmonaut school, but little else is known about them. China's communist government, pursuing a unique, costly propaganda prize and worried about embarrassing setbacks, hasn't announced their names or a launch date.
But with confidence growing after three test launches of empty spacecraft, foreign experts say China's astronauts could carry its gold-starred red flag into space as early as this year.
"The day that we achieve our dream of space flight is not far off," program director Su Shuangning said in a rare interview with the state newspaper Liberation Daily News.
A manned launch would make China only the third nation to send a human into space, after Russia and the United States.
It's a prize that Chinese leaders covet.
They have cast off leftist dogma in favor of economic reform, and now try to bind China together with such flag-waving appeals to nationalism - a strategy seen prominently in the effort that secured the 2008 Olympics for Beijing.
Success in space also could boost the Communist Party's public support after corruption scandals that have ruined its image.
China's propaganda goals echo the U.S.-Russian space race of the 1960s that made heroes of Yuri Gagarin, John Glenn and Neil Armstrong. Yet Beijing so far is striving to keep its pilots anonymous.
State media say the first trainees are 12 pilots from the People's Liberation Army, picked from among 2,000 applicants.
Space officials won't release other information and rejected a request to visit their training center, said to be a converted medical laboratory in Beijing.
"I think they're saying as much as they think they can," said Phillip Clark, a British expert on China's space effort.
Russia's cosmonaut training center outside Moscow says two Chinese astronauts studied there in 2000. Clark said a friend of his met the pair, and they gave their names as Li Qinlong and Wu Zi.
In the only disclosure about their training in China, the newspaper Labor News said in April that the astronauts were preparing for possible emergencies during liftoff by practicing escapes from a space capsule at a launch site in the Gobi Desert.
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