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China: Sky's no longer the
limit
By Antoaneta Bezlova
BEIJING - China laid its claim to being a
growing technology giant by launching its first man in
space Wednesday, breaking more than 40 years of galactic
domination by the United States and Russia.
At
around 9am local time, a single astronaut, or
taikonaut as known to the Chinese, went into
orbit about 200 kilometers above the Earth. The
spacecraft, Shenzhou V (meaning Divine Vessel), lifted
off from the space launch center in Jiuquan, near the
Gobi Desert, and was to return to Earth after 21 hours
in orbit.
Lieutenant-Colonel Yang Liwei, 38, a
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 center near Moscow.
"It is a moment I have
been waiting since I was a child," said Chen Lan, a
longtime China space-program watcher. "It means China
has managed to conquer the last frontier."
The
launch of the Shenzhou V spacecraft came a day after a
pivotal plenary session of the Communist Party Central
Committee underscored 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 repeatedly refused offers
by the Soviet Union to help put a man into 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-type telescope and a
sky laboratory.
Prior to the launch, Chinese
officials emphasized 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 orbit, describing it as "an honor
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
endeavor 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 program is one of the few successful parts
of the vast and costly military industrial complex the
late Chairman Mao Zedong created from the early 1960s
and which at its Cold War peak employed 16 million
people, including 2 million scientists.
Mao
launched the space program as well as the 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 program 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 program began in 1992, directed and
encouraged by former president Jiang Zemin. Jiang, who
has an engineering background, saw China's space program
as as symbol of the country's march toward
modernization.
He has insisted that China needs
to be in space to develop its telecommunications
industry, but also to 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 who saluted the astronaut in yet
another sign that the new leadership is keen on gaining
popular support by fulfilling a longtime Chinese
ambition.
Hu called Yang Liwei a "warrior" who
would probe outer space on behalf of China, bearing the
heavy trust of the motherland and the people to realize
the "millennial dream" of the Chinese nation. He asked
Yang to be cool-headed, staunch and courageous in
performing this "glorious, sacred mission".
A
surge in nationalistic pride seems to have drowned out
questions being raised by some critics who say the space
program is a costly and misplaced effort that merely
repeats what other world powers achieved 40 years ago.
Asked about the price of such an ambitious trip
by a country that still has millions earning less than
US$1 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 will do with
it what they decide. It is great they are investing in
something that makes us proud."
Agreed
space-program 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."
(Inter Press
Service)
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