While I'd agree their space achievements make China look good much as our landing on the moon did, I don't really think propaganda is a primary purpose anymore

While I'd agree their space achievements make China look good much as our landing on the moon did, I don't really think propaganda is a primary purpose anymore - certainly not externally. In space there's effectively infinite land, resources, and potential technological discoveries out there just waiting to be 'plucked'. And whichever group manages to effectively achieve this first will play a key role in shaping the future of our entire species. Technological progress tends to shape humanity. Those that develop technology enabling them to move outward and discover, settle, colonize, and ultimately fortify, decide the future of humanity. If you consider alternative histories it could well have been the Native Americans colonizing Europe had they they technologically developed more rapidly. Or even imagine if they had been able to fight off the invaders. The world would be unimaginably different today. As but one example it's extremely likely you and I would not be communicating in this tongue. Or imagine the aboriginal people of Australia discovering and choosing to use that large island off Europe as a penal colony. But of course this is not how history played out. The developments that led to certain groups ultimately pursuing and achieving such technological ends, and others not, likely have their origins on a time scale of millennia. Yet those actions millennia past have had an irrevocable impact on our species of today whose impact cannot be overstated. And I think the same is true of space, except to an much greater degree. The scale of space is vastly larger than all we currently know as humanity. At some point Earth will indeed be Sagan's pale blue dot, if that, to most humans. And indeed by that point we will have long since moved beyond any notion of our original origins, yet nonetheless our original origins will play a massive role in shaping what we will have become. The most obvious example would again be language. Will the lingua franca be a language that is a derivative of Mandarin or a language that is a derivative of English? Or perhaps something altogether different? And of course, as today, that language would be but a proxy for the cultural, ideological, and other developments brought alongside. In effect whomever ends up dominating space will effectively shape the future face of humanity. For an ambitious nation with a longview, there is but one direction to look - up.