China Bids to Join Exclusive Club of Space Powers - could breathe new life into U.S. program

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese legend holds that a Ming dynasty (1368-1644) man named Wan Hu aimed for the stars by holding kites in each hand and strapping himself to a chair as 47 servants lit 47 gunpowder-packed bamboo tubes tied to his seat.

A roar followed. After the smoke dissipated, the chair was gone, along with Wan Hu. It was unclear if what was purported to be the world's first manned rocket ever made it to the skies.

Today, China is counting down the days to its first manned space launch and hoping to avoid the same fate as Wan Hu, thanks to advanced space technology.

China, long mired in poverty but growing fast after more than two decades of market reforms, is eager for the prestige that would come with being just the third country capable of putting people into space.

"With the launch of the Shenzhou spacecraft, China lifts its technological image into the heavens, bypassing the rest of the advanced-engineering nations," said Anthony Curtis, editor of Space Today Online.

Yu Maochun of the U.S. Naval Academy said: "The manned space program is an essential part of the Communist Party's near fanatical quest for international respect and dignity, which (in) itself is a normal phenomenon among many rising powers in history."

A successful launch, on the heels of Beijing winning a bid to host the 2008 Olympics, could fuel nationalism and boost the Communist Party's credibility as China seeks a place on the world stage alongside great powers.

A failure would be a loss of face and would raise questions about the necessity of a space program in a country where 140 million people live in abject poverty, or on less than $1 a day.

"For China, as with all perilous endeavors, the chance of a deadly public failure looms large. By linking national pride and CCP credibility, Beijing is jeopardizing both," Joshua Eisenman, a fellow at the New American Foundation, a public policy think tank in Washington, wrote in Singapore's Straits Times.

China has cloaked its space program in secrecy, ostensibly to avoid embarrassment in the event of failure.

Stung by a string of failed satellite launches in the 1980s and '90s, China has kept recent lift-offs quiet, announcing them only after success was confirmed.

The date of the launch of the next Shenzhou -- meaning "Divine Ship" -- is a state secret but is expected around the October 1 National Day holidays. Repeated requests to interview space officials have been rejected.

China's first astronauts -- dubbed "taikonauts" from "taikong," the Chinese word for space -- are faceless. China has yet to tell the world who they are, other than they were plucked from the ranks of top fighter pilots.

There are no public details on the launch's budget, though it is believed to be a fraction of U.S. manned space flight costs and is covered under rapidly expanding military outlays.

The launch by China is going ahead despite the loss of the U.S. space shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated in February while re-entering the atmosphere. Seven astronauts died.

Experts said China's space program had no big technology breakthroughs but would incrementally improve existing space technologies such as computers, materials, electronics, rockets, guidance and life support.

It comes as no surprise that China's space program may have military applications.

"As the Soviet Union used its Soyuz capsules and Salyut space stations in the 1970s and 1980s to spy from space and carry out other forms of military research, so will the Chinese," said Curtis of Space Today Online.

Yu of the U.S. Naval Academy said: "This project may boost China's R&D on strategic missile programs, but the cost will be enormous for China."

China has hinted at more starry-eyed space plans. State media have reported on designs for a lunar probe that would be a step toward sending Chinese to the moon.

China is running a record 320 billion yuan ($39 billion) deficit this year. While the economy is flourishing, the health of the financial system is precarious, and any sharp downturn could quickly squelch loftier ambitions for space.

"A wasteful program such as the planned moon landing conducted by a developing country is just a small step for mankind and a giant misstep for China," Yu said in a wry twist on Neil Armstrong's famous quote.

Human boots have not trod on the moon since the U.S. Apollo program ended with the Apollo XVII mission in 1972.

The Soviet Union was the first to put a man in space when Yuri Gagarin reached orbit in 1961. Weeks later, Alan Shepard became the first American in space, although an American didn't orbit Earth until John Glenn did so the following year.

Experts said China may be joining the exclusive space club four decades late, but its entry could trigger a space race in Northeast Asia with Japan and even South Korea.

"The launch of Chinese astronauts will capture the attention of everyone, especially opinion leaders," Curtis said. "That could breathe new life into the U.S. space program as Americans realize that competition has returned after disappearing for a time since the fall of the Soviet Union."

Some analysts were critical of the planned moon landing. "A wasteful program such as the planned moon landing conducted by a developing country is just a small step for mankind and a giant misstep for China," Yu said in a wry twist on Neil Armstrong's famous quote. Human boots have not trod on the moon since the U.S. Apollo program ended with the Apollo XVII mission in 1972.

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Some analysts don't know what they're talking about. With resources for making rocket propellent, and it's proximity to our military and commercial comsats, statigically the Moon is a goldmine.

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Houston Chronicle: Chinese astronauts are men of mystery [Full Text] SHANGHAI, China -- There are a dozen or so candidates, all stellar pilots with the Chinese air force who average about 5 feet 7 inches in height and 142 pounds in weight. Most have been in training for years and although their names and much else about their project remains an official secret, soon one or more of them is likely to climb aboard the Shenzhou 5, a rocket ship whose names means "divine vessel," and blast into orbit.

China appears to be on the verge of becoming just the third nation to send a human into outer space, and even though such an achievement would come more than 40 years after the former Soviet Union and then the United States did so, Chinese officials are laying the groundwork for a major celebration and what they clearly hope will be a jolt of national pride and prestige.

Such a flight, in a craft loosely modeled on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, would come after at least 11 years of planning and test flights with four unmanned space vehicles in recent years. It would also come as the U.S. shuttle fleet remains grounded after the Columbia disaster this past February left seven astronauts dead.

While no formal launch date has been set, a string of recent announcements from top Chinese officials indicates that preparations are intensifying and that blast-off -- from the Jiuquan Space Center, near the Gobi Desert in north China -- could come within weeks, perhaps right after the national holiday week in early October that commemorates the creation of the Communist People's Republic.

Science and Technology Minister Xu Guanhua told the official Chinese media last week that arrangements for Shenzhou 5's launch were proceeding "extremely smoothly," and last week a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Kong Quan, smiled slightly as he said of the mission: "We hope we can realize that goal, sending a man into space, as soon as possible."

Run by the military and shrouded in secrecy, China's space program does appear to be on the verge of a national milestone, one that could well pave the way for a Chinese space station and perhaps a lunar mission, which the Chinese government periodically has described as a long-range goal of the Chinese space program.

But even as a successful mission would be a domestic propaganda coup, its international significance is a matter of considerable debate, with few clear indications yet of whether the Chinese mission actually would break new ground in research or, perhaps, in military applications such as satellite surveillance.

"It's the big question," said Joan Johnson-Freese, an expert on the Chinese space program who is chair of the National Security Decision Making Department at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.

"You will hear that this is huge, that China is developing all kinds of technological prowess that the United States needs to be concerned about," said Johnson-Freese. "You will hear the other end of the spectrum, that they've basically bought a lot of existing Russian technology, and this is not that important at all, they're not up to anything new. I think the answer is somewhere in-between."

A Pentagon report on Chinese military capabilities, released earlier this year, concluded that one goal of the country's space program is to develop improved satellite systems, for conducting its own monitoring and for potentially jamming or intercepting satellites used by other nations.

"While one of the strongest immediate motivations for this program appears to be political prestige, China's manned space efforts almost certainly will contribute to improved military space systems in the 2010-2020 time frame," said the report.

The United States has plenty of its own military space systems, of course, so the broader question is whether Chinese advances are likely to set off a "space race" between the two nations over warfare equipment such as space-based missiles. For now, though, most experts seem to agree that the Chinese would have a long way to go to match current U.S. capabilities -- but that they could also move rapidly to catch up.

"The primary issue is the integration between Chinese military and civil space activities," said James Oberg, who spent 22 years as a space engineer with the shuttle program and is now a Houston-based consultant on space issues. "They do not have any kind of division or barrier, so that technologies developed for one side of the coin quickly augment the capabilities of the other.

"At the same time," Oberg added, "the history of the space age has shown that competition is generally a win-win for all parties, for the whole world. It becomes a fundamentally constructive competition of research and discovery."

Indeed, China is likely to carry out various experiments in weightlessness and perhaps in the space-based breeding of crop seeds, which can result in larger, hardier or quicker-bearing varieties of fruits and vegetables even as it raises concerns about the risks of such genetic manipulation. Chinese space scientists have sent about 60 varieties of crops and seeds on at least seven previous, unmanned Chinese space missions, dating all the way back to the late 1980s, according to Chinese media reports about the program.

Another likely goal of the Chinese space program is to develop a larger share of the market for placing and leasing commercial satellites, and possibly expanding China's ability to rent part of its space capabilities to other nations. Earlier this year, for instance, the Paris-based European Space Agency and China inked a deal enabling European scientists to put some space monitoring devices on a Chinese satellite.

Officials with the Chinese space agency turned down requests for an interview or specific information about launch plans. They also decline to release the annual cost of the Chinese space program, although Western experts put the figure at somewhere between $2 billion and $3 billion, well below the roughly $15 billion the United States spends on its space program. It is believed to be more than what Russia spends on its program, which includes space-station capabilities is in many ways much diminished from the ambitions of the Soviet heyday.

While short on specifics, the Chinese officials are not short on grandeur. As the Web site of the China Aerospace and Technology Corporation, which is involved in building the spacecrafts, puts it: "We are soon to use our Shenzhou manned spaceships to explore the mysterious space frontiers, realizing the nation's dream of spaceflight. . . . We are already using our powerful rockets to build a reliable `Great Wall in the Sky' for the People's Republic."

The most recent unmanned flight, Shenzhou IV, completed a 162-hour orbiting mission in January, in what Chinese officials called the final prelude to a manned mission. Another Shenzhou mission carried animals in space.

The Soyuz-style Shenzhou has a detachable section that can remain in space for several months, and can be linked to other sections to form a small space station.

A corps of so-called "taikonauts," after the Chinese word for outer space, have been in rigorous training for the mission. All are believed to be males.

But while the Shenzhou craft could accommodate as many as three, the likely plan is to send only one man into space for this first mission, said Gong Jiancun, director of Space Environment Forecast Center of the Chinese Academy of Science, who has been involved in the Shenzhou program.

Chinese officials might be playing down the design features, perhaps in the hopes of spinning a successful mission, if it happens, into an even more impressive achievement.

"You're not just going to have a `man in a can' for the first flights" of the Chinese program, said Phillip Clark, a British space expert at the Molniya Space Consultancy. "They've got a spacecraft that can stay in orbit for weeks, that can carry up to three people. It's got a lot of maneuvering capability, they've got a docking system, they can set up a small interim space station. They can do a lot of research up there." [End]

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China Waging War on Space-Based Weapons***The PLA also is experimenting with other types of satellite killers: land-based, directed-energy weapons and "micro-satellites" (search) that can be used as kinetic energy weapons. According to the latest (July 2003) assessment by the U.S. Defense Department, China will probably be able to field a direct-ascent anti-satellite system (search) in the next two to six years.

Such weapons would directly threaten what many believe would be America's best form of ballistic-missile defense: a system of space-based surveillance and tracking sensors, connected with land-based sensors and space-based missile interceptors. Such a system could negate any Chinese missile attack on the U.S. homeland.

China may be a long way from contemplating a ballistic missile attack on the U.S. homeland. But deployment of American space-based interceptors also would negate the missiles China is refitting to threaten Taiwan and U.S. bases in Okinawa and Guam. And there's the rub, as far as the PLA is concerned.

Clearly, Beijing's draft treaty to ban deployment of space-based weapons is merely a delaying tactic aimed at hampering American progress on ballistic-missile defense while its own scientists develop effective countermeasures.

What Beijing hopes to gain from this approach is the ability to disrupt American battlefield awareness--and its command and control operations--and to deny the U.S. access to the waters around China and Taiwan should the issue of Taiwan's sovereignty lead to conflict between the two Chinas.

China's military thinkers are probably correct: The weaponization of space is inevitable. And it's abundantly clear that, draft treaties and pious rhetoric notwithstanding, they're doing everything possible to position themselves for dominance in space. That's worth keeping in mind the next time they exhort "peace-loving nations" to stay grounded.***

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China's PLA Sees Value in Pre-emptive Strike Strategy [Full Text] WASHINGTON, Aug. 11, 2003 - The military strategy of "shock and awe" used to stun the Iraqi military in the opening campaign of Operation Iraqi Freedom might be used by the Chinese if military force is needed to bring Taiwan back under communist control.

According to the released recently The Annual Report on the Military Power of the People's Republic of China, the country's military doctrine now stresses elements such as "surprise, deception and pre- emption." Furthermore, the report states that Beijing believes that "surprise is crucial" for the success of any military campaign.

Taiwan, located off the coast of mainland China, claimed independence from the communist country in 1949. The island has 21 million people and its own democratic government.

China, with 1.3 billion people, claims sovereignty over the tiny island, sees Taiwan as a breakaway province and has threatened to use military force against Taiwan to reunify the country. And China's force against Taiwan could come as a surprise attack.

But "China would not likely initiate any military action unless assured of a significant degree of strategic surprise," according to the report.

The report states that Lt. Gen. Zheng Shenxia, chief of staff of the People's Liberation Army's Air Force and an advocate of pre-emptive action, believes the chances of victory against Taiwan would be "limited" without adopting a pre-emptive strategy.

The report says that China now believes pre-emptive strikes are its best advantage against a technologically superior force. Capt. Shen Zhongchang from the Chinese Navy Research Institute is quoted as saying that "lighting attacks and powerful first strikes will be widely used in the future."

China's new military thinking has evolved over the past decade. PLA observers have been studying U.S. military strategies since the first Gulf War, when they noticed how quickly U.S. forces using state-of-the-art weapons defeated Iraqi forces that in some ways resemble their own.

Since then, the report states the PLA has shifted its war approach from "annihilative," where an army uses "mass and attrition" to defeat an enemy, to more "coercive warfighting strategies."

The PLA now considers "shock power" as a crucial coercion element to the opening phase of its war plans and that PLA operational doctrine is now designed to actively "take the initiative" and "catch the enemy unprepared."

"With no apparent political prohibitions against pre- emption, the PLA requires shock as a force multiplier to catch Taiwan or another potential adversary, such as the United States, unprepared," the report states.

Ways the PLA would catch Taiwan and the U.S. off guard include strategic and operational deception, electronic warfare and wearing down or desensitizing the opponent's political and military leadership. Another objective would be to reduce any indication or warning of impending military action, the report states.

Preparing for a possible conflict with Taiwan and deterring the United States from intervening on Taiwan's behalf is the "primary driver" of China's military overhaul, according to this year's report. Over the course of the next decade the country will spend billions to counter U.S. advances in warfare technology, the report states. [End]

The Chinese government can pour all the money they want into this endeavor......and labor is cheap.

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.*** [Full Text at LINK

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