The Great Leap Upward: China gets space
Pinkerton, James P.
"The Great Leap Upward: China gets space" AMERICA CAN'T AFFORD NOT TO. BY JAMES P. PINKERTON I n 1972, Henry Kissinger met with Chou En-lai in Beijing and asked the Chinese foreign minister if he...
...But the Chinese are thinking it right now...
...If the Chinese do indeed take up a shrewd grand strategy toward space, their Leninist one-party system, dogmatically intolerant of dissent, will help them stay focused on this goal...
...the Chinese worked on their Great Wall, on and off, from the 7th century BC to the 17th century AD...
...this year or even this decade—although there's plenty of evidence that it could—but because China seems to be applying a James P. Pinkerton is a columnist fir Newsday and TechCentralStation.com and a fellow at the NewAmerica Foundation...
...What's telling about 1998...
...But there's ample evidence that they have learned from their mistakes...
...will compete...
...China's labeling of the Rumsfeld Commission report as "provocative" should be seen for what it was: a bit of pre-emptive projection, an opportunistic exercise in geopolitical victimology...
...hitherto unimportant Portugal established a trading post at Macao in 1557, part of a sprawling maritime empire...
...In 1405 the Ming Emperor dispatched a fleet of 317 vessels to explore trade oceanic routes to the west...
...In January 2001, a second Rumsfeld-led commission warned against just such a collision—specifically, against a "space Pearl Harbor...
...After all, with apologies to Chou En Lai, while the first couple of centuries since the 1776 American Revolution have yielded highly positive results, there are no final victories...
...And just as the Chinese decided, 500 years ago, to go as one into terrestrial isolation, they can decide tomorrow—and possibly already have—to go into a long march of extra-terrestrial extension...
...Increasing population and decreasing resources on the earth," the Xinhua report concludes, "have made it necessary to seek new living space and resources in outer space" China, with 1.2 billion people and a burgeoning technology sector, is thinking lebensraum...
...Talk about keeping things in perspective...
...Others say they were anxious to concentrate resources on the rebuilding of the Great Wall...
...Maybe Americans don't feel comfortable thinking in long time frames...
...Chou-like perspective to developments beyond the stratosphere.This is, after all, the country that dubbed its first workhorse launch rocket "Long March...
...But there's more:"China's exploration and utilization of space, the so-called 'fourth frontier' of mankind, has been encouraging and promising as the country is improving its aerospace technology and national strength...
...The Chinese appear to have learned their lesson...
...backed away from space in the 20th century, just as the Chinese edged away from the sea in the 15th century...
...We had been Manifest Destinarians since the time of the Pilgrims, and yet now look at us...
...Historically, the answer—for the U.S., the former Soviet Union and now for China—has been yes:A robust aerospace sector naturally generates both civilian and military applications...
...That's a way of thinking about space that most Americans haven'theard since NASA's salad days in the 1960s...
...On July 15 of that year, the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, a bipartisan group chaired by Donald Rumsfeld, the once-and-future secretary of defense, issued a report arguing that the danger to the U.S...
...Formally known as the Commission to Assess National Security Space Management and Organization, it wrote that "the U.S...
...As Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge said as he was sworn in at the White House last October, "My friends in the Army Corps of Engineers remind me of their motto, `The difficult, we do innnediately.The impossible takes a little longer...
...More recently, they have been refurbishing it yet again—this time for tourists...
...Another arms race in outer space has begun since 1998, and we should be watchful...
...So it's a disturbing historical portent that the U.S...
...These voyages were recorded in books with evocative titles, such as Marvels Discovered by the Boat Bound for the Galaxy and Treatise on the Barbarian Kingdoms of the Western Oceans.Then, in the mid-15th century, China made a historic U-turn.The Imperial court outlawed going to sea aboard multi-masted ships and, for good measure, banned big-ship construction...
...If the goal is protection from threats, now and into the infinite future, tortoise-like plodding—and plotting can be as important as a hare-like sprinting...
...And if the competition heats up and rises up—if the Chinese see space as a frontier for national expansion—then the U.S...
...for all our triumphs, we have yet to prove that we can sustain a long march through history...
...Historically, China called itself "the Middle Kingdom" And if China was already the center of the universe, the thinking ran, then there wasn't much need to get out into the rest of it...
...Wortzel sees space militarization as vital to effective missile defense...
...The Associated Press followed up with a story quoting Chinese Foreign Ministry official Huang Huikang: "Some powers in the world are on the way to militarizing outer space, not peacefully exploring...
...China doesn't have to be an enemy of the U.S., but it can't help but be a competitor...
...as transcribed by the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., the report stated that China had completed ground tests of "an advanced anti-satellite weapon called `parasitic satellite,' which will be deployed on an experimental basis and enter the stage of space test in the near future...
...in fairness, of course, most Occidental attention was focused else-where during the fall and winter of 2001...
...The Chinese, after all, invented the game of weigi—known in the West by its Japanese name, go—which requires the utmost patience and long-term positioning.That out-look spills over into geopolitics...
...Rumsfeld and President Bush deserve credit for canceling the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, thus opening the door to space-based military systems...
...And that could have implications far beyond the next Hainan Island-type spy-plane incident implications that may stretch out over centuries...
...As Lang Sili, a Chinese government space scientist, told Xinhua in November, "For mankind in the 21st century, space application will become as essential as electricity and oil in the 19th century...
...But occasionally they look ahead...
...Yet sitting atop 5,1)00 years of Chinese history, Chou had a point: it can't hurt to let events unfold before rushing to judgment...
...One such possible threat was reported by a Chinese-language Hong Kong newspaper just before the Rumsfeld report appeared...
...But is there a link between missile offense, missile defense and an ambitious space program...
...Some will say that, from an historical perspective, the Chinese are not expansionist...
...But he believes that the Chinese are going to militarize space no matter what, so the only question is whether the U.S...
...Whatever the case, one of the country's traditional strengths—unityworked against it: a single stupid decision by the imperial court was enough to stop cold all ocean-going ventures...
...In spite of the pointed nature of Huang's comments, reaction in the West was minimal...
...But if we don't think in tortoise-time, we ultimately risk losing to those peoples who do...
...Rumsfeld II" was reacting in part to continuing developments in China...
...Wortzel makes a distinction between "militarization"—space-based intelligence and surveillance—and "weaponization," which includes directed-energy devices, such as lasers, as well as missiles...
...must react for the sake of its well-being, maybe even for the sake of its own survival...
...One American who has been watching China's space threat closely is Larry Wortzel...
...But the report was also specific about China, a country described as "modernizing its long-range missiles and nuclear weapons in ways that will make it a more threatening power in the event of a crisis...
...If the Chinese are serious, then one of the huge blunders they made in the last millennium—failure to look outward, to fill a geopolitical vacuum—could be rectified in the coming millennium, in the astro-political vacuum...
...China thereby condemned itself to stagnation...
...According to a November report from the official Chinese news agency Xinhua, Luan Enjie, director of China's State Aerospace Bureau, announced that his organization would push "the development of space technology, space utilization and space science in civil sectors, promoting the country's economic and social development and national defense" China, the report continued, would launch three satellites in the next year, to monitor weather, study the oceans and search for natural resources, as part of a five-year, 30-satellite plan that would culminate with sending a human into space...
...After all, tortoises usually outlive hares...
...In the course of a long Army career, he spent four years as a military attache in Beijing, where he was an eyewitness to the 1989 Tienanmen Square massacre...
...Americans, of course, are celebrated for their right-away, can-do spirit...
...The Chinese space effort is inevitable," says Wortzel, who now directs the Asian Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation, "and it will include space militarization...
...and its allies in and from space does not command the attention it merits...
...America is a young country...
...The Chinese seem to understand this—that a "space race" is much more palatable than an "arms race...
...But it remains to be seen whether they can generate support for a civilian complement...
...we've essentially stopped manned exploration, and the last American walked on the Moon in 1972...
...And so Americans should pay close attention to the latest news about the Chinese space program...
...Surely that was the lesson to be drawn from Bush's trip to Beijing in February, when he found himself at a chilly impasse with the Chinese on matters ranging from Taiwan to Iraq to missile defense to religious freedom...
...If a country's space interests are seen as merely military—which is certainly the case today in the U.S...
...Why...
...Moreover, Huang's reference to "1998" is telling...
...We Chinese feel it is too soon to tell," Chou answered...
...But interestingly, the Chinese ventured forth anyway...
...The question now is whether America can learn from a country that is older and—the hard way—perhaps wiser...
...today—they will enjoy less support than if accompanied by a civilian component...
...it indicates that China is seeking to lay blame for future space-militarization on the U.S., positioning Chinese missile-offense efforts as merely a defensive reaction to American missile-ing...
...it was the Soviet Union, after all, that put the first satellite, Sputnik, into space...
...That's great, but there's a difference between the doing of deeds and the unfolding of time.That is, a people or a country can do everything possible about visible threats, and yet still be vulnerable to those that only emerge later...
...Centralized systems don't often make good political decisions—viz 15th century China...
...is more dependent on space than any other nation,°'Yet, the report warned: "The threat to the U.S...
...Six more expeditions followed in the next three decades, reaching India, Arabia and Africa...
...If the strategic logic of "High Frontier" were linked to the demo-graphic logic of China's "Fourth Frontier," the resulting civilian-military synergy would strengthen Rumsfeld & Co.'s hand...
...ts MARCH/APRIL 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 39...
...Not because China necessarily poses a threat to the U.S...
...Talk about keeping your cards close to your vest...
...True enough...
...But so far, at least, the Bushmen seem to see NASA as a place for budget cuts, not for vision-thinging...
...was "broader, more mature and evolving more rapidly than has been reported in estimates and reports by the Intelligence Community" The Rumsfeld report was a reaction to missile-threats posed by many countries, including North Korea and Iran...
...Some historians say that China's mandarins, preoccupied with centralized order-keeping, feared "corruption" by foreign influences...
...Soon, 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • MARCH/APRIL 2002 other European countries followed, and China suffered centuries of foreign domination.All of which proves that if countries, like people, don't stay on offense, they will end up on defense...
...Fourth frontier...
...BY JAMES P. PINKERTON I n 1972, Henry Kissinger met with Chou En-lai in Beijing and asked the Chinese foreign minister if he thought the French Revolution of 1789 had benefited humanity...
...But history rarely smiles on nations that can only juggle one ball at a time...
...THE GREAT LEAP UPWARD CHINA GETS SPACE...
Vol. 35 • March 2002 • No. 2
