SCIENCE: By Launching ‘Taikonaut’, China Lays Claim on Space

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Oct 15 2003 (IPS) - China laid its claim to being a growing technology giant by launching its first man in space Wednesday, breaking over 40 years of galactic domination by the United States and Russia.

China laid its claim to being a growing technology giant by launching its first man in space Wednesday, breaking over 40 years of galactic domination by the United States and Russia.

At around 9 a.m. local time, a single astronaut, or ‘taikonaut’ as known to the Chinese, went into orbit about 200 kilometres above the Earth. The spacecraft, Shenzhou V (meaning Divine Vessel), lifted off from the space launch centre in Jiuquan, near the Gobi desert, and is expected to return to Earth after 21 hours in orbit.

Lt Col Yang Liwei, 38, and member of the military-trained Chinese Astronaut Team, became the first Chinese astronaut in outer space.

Brimming with national pride, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported that Yang ”had been trained at home”. Initial reports have said that two of the three astronauts selected for the historic manned flight trained with their Russian counterparts at the Star City space centre near Moscow.

”It is a moment I have been waiting since I was a child,” said Chen Lan, a long-time China space programme watcher. ”It means China has managed to conquer the last frontier.”

The launch of the Shenzhou V spacecraft comes a day after a pivotal plenary session of the Communist Party Central Committee underscored the President Hu Jintao’s ambition to break new ground and leave its own mark of a modern and populist government. The meeting endorsed a wide-ranging economic reform package, designed to help China become a full-blown market economy.

For a leadership almost exclusively assembled from engineers, the cost of the launch will be justified by the surge of nationalist pride throughout China. China, unlike Mongolia and other eastern European countries, has repeatedly refused offers by the Soviet Union to help put man in space, and has raced to outpace India in the space marathon.

After the successful launch of Shenzhou V, Beijing is also planning to send a human being to the moon by 2010 and to establish a space station of its own. It also wants its own Hubble telescope and a sky laboratory.

Chinese officials have emphasised that everything sent in space aboard Shenzhou V would be made in China.

”China’s space technology has been created by China itself,” Xie Guangxuan, former director of the China Rocket Design Department, told ‘Beijing Youth Daily’. ”We may have started later than Russia and the United States, but it is amazing how fast we’ve been able to do this.”

Hu, who was present at the launch site, hailed China’s success in hurling its first manned spacecraft into the orbit, describing it as ”an honour for our great motherland, an indicator for the initial victory of the country’s first manned space flight and for a historic step taken by the Chinese people in their endeavour to surmount the peak of the world’s science and technology”. The successful completion of the space mission would be a triumph for the military.

China’s space programme is one of the few successful parts of the vast and costly military industrial complex which Chairman Mao Zedong created from the early 1960s and which at its Cold War peak employed 16 million people, including two million scientists.

Mao Zedong launched the space programme as well as project to develop nuclear weapons in the belief that military supremacy was the only way China could compete with its ideological enemies. While millions were dying of hunger during the great famine of 1959-61, China’s fledgling space programme received generous funding.

This period culminated in the launch of China’s first satellite in 1971, which circled the Earth broadcasting communist China’s anthem, ‘The East is Red’.

The current space programme began in 1992, directed and encouraged by former President Jiang Zemin. Jiang, who has an engineering background, saw China’s space programme as as symbol of the country’s march toward modernisation.

He has insisted that China needs to be in space to develop its telecommunications industry, but also make sure that space does not become an out-of-reach battleground in future conflicts.

Expectations had been running high that Jiang, who remains head of China’s military and still wields a significant influence in party politics, would be present at the space launch to congratulate the astronaut and claim credit in China’s galactic success.

Instead, it was Hu Jintao who saluted the astronaut in yet another sign that new leadership is keen on gaining popular support by fulfilling a long-time Chinese ambition.

Hu Jintao called Lt Col Yang Liwei a ”warrior” to probe outer space on behalf of China, bearing the heavy trust of the motherland and the people to realise the ”millennial dream” of the Chinese nation. He asked Yang to be cool-headed, staunch and courageous in performing this ”glorious, sacred mission”.

Surge in nationalistic pride seems to have drowned out questions being raised by some critics who say the space programme is a costly and misplaced effort that merely repeats what other world powers have achieved 40 years ago.

Asked about the price of such galactic trip in a country that still has millions earning less than a dollar a day, building contractor Ma Bin shrugged: ”This is not America where money comes from the taxpayers. This is money of the Communist Party – they would do with it what they decide. It is great they are investing them into something that makes us proud.”

Agreed space programme observer Chen Lan: ”If we wait until our Gross Domestic Product is equal to that of the United States to send a man into space, then we would be too late. Conquering space requires accumulated efforts over a long period of time. If China wants to play a major role in the world, it must become a member of the space club now and not later.”