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.
I’m not worried about the Chinese military/government space program, because we Americans are going into the space business, and business always moves faster than do government programs. By the time the government in Peking gets around to setting up the first lunar ping-pong tournament, we’ll have a privately-owned space railroad up and running, carrying freight and passengers into space for the price of a first-class ticket to Europe. The space railway will play the same role in the opening of the moon, Mars, asteroids, and planets that the transcontinental railroads played in the colonization of the American West. Once that space railway is built, the solar system will be ours.
The surface of the moon is made of granulated rock — a layer of loose regolith on top of a layer of steel-hard rock and compressed powder. The Lunar Module’s tiny engine (9,900 lbs thrust) was powerful enough to blow the top layer of powder away, but nowhere near hot or energetic enough to gouge out a crater in the compacted regolith beneath it. Asking “where‘s the crater?” underneath the Lunar Module makes as much sense as asking why a jet airliner’s engines (roughly 18,500-23,500 lbs thrust x 2 engines for a B727) don’t blow a hole in a concrete runway every time one takes off. The answer is that neither vehicle’s engines produces anywhere near enough thrust to blast out a crater in a hard surface.
Without tin foil, why
would the internet exist?
(The crater "question"
still applies. Some pics
show moon dust at the landing,
footsteps by the LEM,
that kind of thing. So,
it wasn't blown away by
engines at landing.
Then why don't we see
a specific depression
in whatever's there?)
The dust beneath the LM was blown away by the engine’s jet exhaust, leaving bare rock and tightly-compacted regolith there. (As I explained previously, no crater was formed in the rock and regolith beneath the LM because the LM engine wasn’t stron enough to blast a crater into it.)
As for the footprints: the dust surrounding the LM wasn’t directly under the engine and therefore did not get blown away. Remember, the Moon has no atmosphere to speak of; only the dust that was directly beneath the LM's exhaust plume would be affected by it. Other dust (even if it were only a few feet away) would be undisturbed by the engine blast because there is no “wind” to carry the force of the engine’s exhaust.
As denials go,
that's "plausible." [!] But the moon
has a kind of thing
called a "rayed crater."
The idea is, impacts
and disturbances
spread material
visibly and great distance
in low gravity.
NASA doesn't show
any crater or debris
blown from the landing.
During the Third Reich,
there was a lot of conflict
between businessmen
and party members.
Speer says the early "success"
of the Nazis was
because businessmen
were empowered to work free,
but that same success
also empowered
the NAZI party, which then
began usurping
and undercutting
rational business controls.
When "party thinking"
dominated all,
the Reich started to crumble,
and then fell apart.
This same dynamic --
business success followed by
political crash --
may play itself out
in China -- their successes
may lead to their crash...
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