Just for completeness,
I'm going to mention that
the US does things
for different reasons
many times, than other lands.
Many tin foil types
see our space program
as a money-siphon and
publicity dance.
Posted on 10/19/2003 11:21:18 AM PDT by churchillbuff
China's space shot is a warning for the West By Andrew Roberts, London Sunday Telegraph (Filed: 19/10/2003)
"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.
Between 1993 and 2002, the capitalist coastal provinces of China grew in per capita GDP from $815 to $2,020 - a staggering 148 per cent - while their population only grew from 321 million to 355 million, or 10 per cent. Over the same period, EU per capita GDP rose by 10 per cent on a 2 per cent population increase, the US increased its per capita GDP by 43 per cent as its population increased by 10 per cent. If the Chinese economy continues to expand at something between 9 per cent and 11 per cent a year, as most economists expect, the 21st will be the Chinese Century, just as the 20th has been the American one.
By embracing free markets in its coastal provinces, China has unleashed the initiative of the most instinctively capitalist people on the planet. "One Country, Two Systems" has been a triumph for the octogenarian master-strategists of Beijing. Furthermore, by learning the lesson of the Soviet Union's overvalued rouble and therefore keeping its currency, the RMB, pegged at an undervalued rate to the dollar, China has boosted its exports to an astonishing degree. City analysts predict that next year they will rise by between 15 and 20 per cent.
The world will be a very different, and far less comfortable place for us when China displaces the US as the world's greatest power, as seems inevitable by the middle of of this century. When the imperial baton passed from Britain to the US, at least the succeeding power spoke our language, shared our values, and had twice been our battle-tested ally. By contrast, China is one of the most vicious states in existence. In its 2003 annual report, Amnesty International highlighted the way that in that country, "serious human rights violations continued and in some respects the situation deteriorated. Tens of thousands of people continue to be arbitrarily detained or imprisoned for peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression, association or belief. Torture and ill-treatment remain widespread".
Apologists for Chinese totalitarianism argue that a country of 1.5 billion people cannot be ruled democratically, yet neighbouring India, with over one billion, has managed it well enough. Chinese democracy activists dread the coming of the Olympics to Beijing in 2008, since whenever a spotlight is trained on their country there are ruthless security crackdowns, such as those for the 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1999.
With a foot on the neck of Tibet, a projected 10 per cent increase in defence spending for 2004, ceaseless sabre-rattling against democratic Taiwan, and an officer corps that is by turns paranoiac and jingoistic, China also protects North Korea's nuclear weapons programme. This behaviour hardly augurs well for a peaceful Chinese Century.
Of course the Chinese themselves regard a superpower status, and the glory days of the Middle Kingdom, as no more than proper deserts for the country that invented printing, gunpowder and Ming porcelain. In 1500 China accounted for one-quarter of the world's GDP, a figure that rose to nearly one-third by 1820, when it suddenly began to collapse. A return to such global eminence by 2025 would simply confirm the Chinese in their belief that the period since 1820 has merely been an unfortunate blip.
For the rest of us, a world dominated by modern Chinese political culture would mean nothing less than the kind of "new Dark Age" that Churchill warned would be the consequence of a Nazi victory. The hymnal reminds us of how "Earth's proud empires pass away" and, of course, the present hegemony of the English-speaking peoples cannot last forever, but it will be tragic when - not if - Western civilisation is overtaken in power, wealth and prestige by Chinese Communo-militarism.
Mr. Smith is. Let's send him to Washington!
FMCDH
FMCDH
They're accelerating in a useless direction, and learning the wrong things. American entrepreneurs will lead the way into space, not government programs that spend millions to put up little capsules on expendable rockets.
When they start to learn from the newly emerging private space industry, rather than the old failed Soviet or NASA model, then we should worry.
When you take 100 million girl babies and kill them, what do you do with their 100 million husbands (who will never so much as get a kiss from a female) when they've grown? You set them on each other to kill each other off. Not rocket science.
Not necessarily, they might invade Taiwan. The prospect of acquiring a wife is a good incentive for a man.
I'd rather build the Space Station.
Why do I see a classic Marxist revolution by the have-nots of the interior happening here? Of course, maybe not, since the people of the people of the interior have a semi-prehistoric culture.
Of course not, but look at Lockheed. They had their X-33 (the shuttle replacement) canceled because they weren't meeting project milestones and couldn't show that is was going to work from an engineering standpoint. Boeing had their space launches cut in half, costing them billions, because they got caught cheating on a contract source selection (they got caught red-handed with Lockheed proprietary data in their possession).
So where is all that great success with commercial space flight that people on this thread keep talking about? All I'm reading about is problems and more problems.
Commsats is the only significant private space business. Everything else is military/NASA.
I agree it 'seems inevitable'. But the future is extremely difficult to predict and a lot of things can happen to gum up the works for China, including their own foul ups. One distinct possibility is that America - the other sleeping giant - will rise to the occasion and put to rest the issue of who remains the sole superpower.
Hmmmm. 22 years. How many of its own people can China murder in 22 years? They haven't had a good Cultural Revolution or Great Leap Forward in quite some time. They're due for a few years of self-immolation.
You see, this article ignores the fact that it's not the "hegemony of the English speaking peoples" that's kept China down. It's their own rulers that have done that.
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.***
Just for completeness,
I'm going to mention that
the US does things
for different reasons
many times, than other lands.
Many tin foil types
see our space program
as a money-siphon and
publicity dance.
US: NASA's workforce - NASA's mission?*** NASA has serious personnel problems. Twenty-five percent of its scientists and engineers will be eligible to retire in the next three to five years, and, as the agency's workforce has been graying, few fresh-faced recruits have been coming through its doors. NASA needs to offer incentives to potential hires.***
THEM: China rediscovers technology***Pride in high profile and immensely difficult technological achievements such as space exploration are seen by most Chinese as testament to China's reclaiming of its rightful place in the sun.
Some Chinese believe in their hearts that Chinese are really superior to Westerners in terms of basic abilities and see China's growing technological prowess as confirmation of these racial prejudices. Popular appeal is one reason why the Chinese government is able to invest vast sums in an ambitious space program, even though China faces immense social needs. Achievements in space exploration also allow the Chinese government to claim it is blotting out the past century of "humiliation" of China. ***
...but there could also be a tremendous confrontation between China and the West, instigated by the Chinese leadership as a way to finesse the drive from below for freedom. this is the real danger, particularly given the Chinese demographics with its surplus of males (e.g. - cannon fodder)
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. ***
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