“NO SPACE RACE”

These early achievements took place against a background of continued turmoil. The Military Commission, which was dominated by leftists led by Lin Biao, persuaded the government and party to adopt a new five-year plan (1971-76) which had the slogan “three years catching up, two years overtaking”. This plan committed the country to a furious expansion of the space program, with eight new launch vehicles and 14 new satellites in five years (other reports speak of an average of nine satelhtes a year). Many of these projects, which most scientists considered to be unnecessary and unrealistic, got under way, though few saw the Ught of day. They disrupted existing projects and saw the commencement of several projects which later had to be abandoned. There were fresh political interruptions after the dramatic events of September 1971 when Lin Biao fled China for the Soviet Union: en route, his plane was shot down by Chinese fighters and it crashed in flames. There were purges and counter-purges of his associates in the space program. Order did not return until after the death of Mao in September 1976 and the overthrow by the military of the Gang of Four led by his wife Jiang Qing the following month.

The 1971-76 plan was scaled down to more limited objectives, the principal one being to launch a geostationary communications satellite. The emerging leader, Deng Xiaoping, presented a much revised space policy in August 1978. China was a developing country and “as far as space technology is concerned, we are not taking part in the space race. There is no need for us to go to the Moon and we should concentrate our resources on urgently needed and functional practical satellites”. The space budget was trimmed to meet more modest ambitions, falling to 0.035% of Gross National Product, traihng not only the big space powers, but neighboring comparators Japan (0.04%) and India (0.14%), too. Deng Xiaoping encouraged newer, younger, and more pragmatic engineers and managers to come forward in industry, concentrating on modernization rather than ideological struggle, although it took some time to undo the damage done to science, education, and industry by the cultural revolution.

Several months later, in October 1978, Deng Xiaoping announced the “four modernizations”: science and military technology, agriculture, education, and industry (dissidents cheekily added a fifth modernization: democracy). This began the process of opening the country not only to foreign investment and private enterprise, but also to international cooperation in science. In 1980, China joined the International Astronautical Federation, the Chinese membership body being the Chinese Society of Astronautics, whose president was Tsien Hsue Shen. China joined the International Telecommunications Union and the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. Twenty years of isolation from the world space community came to an end, with visits by space experts from the European Space Agency, France, Japan, and an American delegation even toured. China hosted its first international space conferences on space in 1985. China negotiated with the United States for the use of Landsat data and purchased a ground station to receive its data the following year. By 1988, China was sending its most promising engineering graduates to courses in the MIT, from where their predecessors had been driven out in the 1950s. China joined the international committee on space research, COSPAR, in 1992.

The Chinese space program opened up within China itself. Workers in the space industry had been prohibited, on pain of extreme penalties, from telling their families where they worked and, in a practice borrowed from the Soviet Union, they were assigned mailbox numbers, their institutes never being geographically identified. The greatest challenge faced by new graduates assigned to the space industry was to actually find their future place of work, since virtually no one was allowed to tell them where it was! Likewise, the railway fine to Jiuquan had not been marked on any map. From now on, most space organizations were publicly named, identified, and listed.