Um…you do realize that those satellite thingies are commercially viable, right? And afaik they all got into space on the backs of ‘Rocket-based propulsion’ systems. I don’t know if mining will or won’t be commercially viable in the future, but space exploitation using rocket-based propulsion certainly has been and will continue to be commercially viable, if nothing else on the telco side of things.
-XT
That’d be quite a challenge, but if there’s one country that can do things in a big way . . . look at the Great Wall! (Ignore the fact that the Mongols somehow got past it. ;))
Yeah, and the Egyptians built the pyramids. How’s that Egyptian space program working out?
Organizing millions of peasants to engage in backbreaking manual labor is hardly the same as building a technologically advanced space program staffed with highly trained people and capable of dramatic innovations.
China still lags the rest of the world in car quality, and it doesn’t seem to be particularly innovative. Instead, most of China’s high-tech is reverse-engineered, or made in conjunction with partners from other countries.
So long as China has high levels of state interference in the economy and high levels of cronyism and corruption in its quasi-private markets, it’s going to run into all kinds of problems. Growth in China is currently high because it started from such an incredibly low point and has so much low-hanging fruit to be harvested, but there are already lots of signs of gross mismanagement of assets and malinvestment of resources.
As for their space program, the Chinese have been making grandiose claims about their plans for space for several decades, and so far they don’t have that much to show for it. I wish them well, but I’m highly skeptical.
China seems to recently have a trend for acquiring tech from partnerships but then improving it. Eg the chinese Shinkansen CRH2 started off being licensed from Kawasaki but then they improved the design and now make it locally.
As for innovation, China is now investing in native R&D, eg the Super Capacitor Buses that are running commercially in Shanghai are Chinese developed tech that they are now licensing to other countries.
Patience, they’ve been working on it! The figures show the light at the end! Just a few more thousand tons of dressed stone, and those things will fly!
:mad: And even that trick they stole from the Japanese!
China can be thought of as an insecure 14 year with a big bank account who is desperate to sit at the adult table, but doesn’t quite get that legitimacy and respect come from taking responsibility and showing integrity. For various reasons- a communal relationship-based culture, a memory of when everyone in town payed tributes to China, a national narrative that China suffered a “century of humiliation” because the west are big meanies and we’ll show them- China craves respect more than just about anything else. Like an adolescent, it seeks this the only way it knows how- strutting, bullying, and when truly outclassed, playing the whiney “why is everyone so mean to me” victim.
The decline of the US space program is not from weakness. It is because it worked- we won our dick-waving contest with the Soviets. We won so much that we don’t really have to show our dicks to anyone in order to get respect. People know who we are.
And along comes China, late to the party, eager to show off its newfound hardon. It’s building spaceships and bullet trains (while inland cities without journalists don’t have the traffic lights they need) and wondering when everyone is going to acknowledge that their dick is just like one of the big boys.
coremelt, you have a lot to learn about the country you live in. Shanghai is a bit of a walled garden. If it has a standard of living on par with Europe (which it does) then someone is living way below that 7,200 GDP per capita. In rural Guizhou for example, the standard of living is that of Ghana. Wait a year or so until you start figuring you know what goes on in China, and make sure to get on at least one extended road trip (not just a day trip) through Guizhou, Qinghai or Yunnan.
I am absolutely aware that Shanghai is not representative of China, and I intend to get out on a motorbike into some remote areas when I can. However as I understand it, the development is not confined to Shanghai but is all along the coastal strip and along the major river valleys.
The US has dirt poor areas where the average wages are well below the national average, every country does.
Do it. China is often more like two countries than one and there s not a lot of social mobility between the two. There are a lot of deep divisions right below the surface. And as easy as the line is, our poverty is not the same. We don’t have people in the US whose life dream is to be able to eat meat once a day. We don’t have entire states under indefinite martial law. We don’t have memories of midwives drowning our newborn baby cousin. This stuff still happens, and is a part of the system that builds those high rises.
PM is you want some travel advice or recommndations on books about China.
Yes, China can think long-term, and the US pays China something around $90 billion/year just in interest on its debts. That buys lots of toys.
Antarctica? Protected, and who wants to colonize it anyway?
The moon? Whoever can go there and stay, owns it. That’s more land than all of the continent of Africa. It’s almost a whole Asia-sized chuck of real-estate. If China claims it, there isn’t diddly squat the US & the rest of the industrialized world can do about it but whine and ask permission to use some of it, pretty please, at whatever price China decides to charge.
Long-term, the moon is a very sweet, strategic chunk of high ground territory.
“Real Estate”? The moon makes the Sahara desert look like Eden by comparison.
You are seriously engageing in some outlandish fantasizing about China’s capacity. China can barely control China. It has two massive country-sized provinces in near permanent revolt, which they are so bad at holding on to that they have to resort to gunpoint martial law for decades on end just to keep them a part of China. And that is within their own borders!
China has climbed from the deep third world to the edge of middle income, and that is an achievment. But it’s still a deeply poor and divided country with an insecure dinosaur government, which only has the “absolute control” card left against the threat from powerful local governments, business and mafia interests, separatist movements and simmering rage of millions left behind by progress or disilluioned by consumerism without real freedom. They’ve been lucky to ride a demographic boom and have supplemented that by recording privitization of public goods as economic progress and loaning money for infrastructure development like crazy. But if you look at the books and read between the lines, there are some critical threats to both economic and political stability coming up.
This idea that China is run by super-visionary geniuses who can implement their grand masterplan without the interference of petty political concerns of mere mortals is not grounded in reality. The Party is fighting tooth and nail for its legitimacy on earth, and playng a very current, very reactionary and IMHO very fragile political game right now, and their very survival depends on it.
China could be the size of Rhode Island and if it’s physically laid claim to the entire moon and no one else can, then it owns the moon. Moon rocks and craters don’t revolt.
Tibet and Xinjiang are massive, but the total populations of Tibet and Xinjiang is 23 million people. Which is 0.0017 percent of China’s population. I think they can cope with that. Tibet is only 1.6 million people.
From what I can see the 91.5 % majority Han chinese support the CPC. Why wouldn’t they since the CPC has given them 10 years of 10 percent growth and they have more opportunity now than they ever have before.
Personally I am willing to bet (and am fact I am betting) that it’s more likely that China’s government will continue uninterrupted for the next 20 years than the US government will.
And…?
What are the ramifications to the rest of the world if the Chinese plant a flag on the moon? The American flag has been there solo for 42 plus years and that has done what for the US exactly?
You seem like you’ve travelled in China but this statement is very western centric. Eating meat once a day is not actually healthy for Humans. Probably more than 50 percent of the population of the planet does not eat meat every day and you know what? most of them have happy lives.
I’ve travelled widely in some of the poorest areas of India and spoken to families in Mumbai slums. Many of them are contented, they have their family, religion and a strong community spirit. The smart ones save money to send their kids to school to have a better life and the lazy ones spend all their money on alcohol and money lenders and get trapped in poverty for another generation.
Read “Shantaram” for an excellent real world true story of a westerner that lived and worked in the Mumbai slums for years as a bare foot doctor and you’ll get an idea of how life is really like for “dirt poor peasants”.
I’ll be the first to agree that the most important thing in the lives of the poor is not their poverty.
Still, poverty in China is not “like” poverty in the US or Australia. The kind of poverty that focuses your life dreams around the basic hunger for animal protein (as one of my students wrote in a class I taught on setting goals- I taught two years in a small university in an rural/industrial city in Sichuan) is something of a different quality.
And none of this has anything to do with the moon or my basic premise that if China can’t even manage to take over China in the course of 50 years, I think the moon is pretty safe for a while.
All Your Base Are Belong to Us! 
Ha-ha! Who smelling fragrant monkey tail now?!
Is merely planting a flag their stated intention?