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This fixation on the moon in a country with stark poverty for most of its rural majority is a sign of China's tyrannical government. The government is seeking g

This fixation on the moon in a country with stark poverty for most of its rural majority is a sign of China's tyrannical government. The government is seeking glory for the ruling party rather improvement of the daily lives of the common people. (Yes, I do read Chinese and I have been to China more than once and I have been studying China's national policies since the 1970s.) I wish there were a higher percentage of participants on Hacker News who have both thorough knowledge of the language and culture and regular access to the Chinese press and mass media to comment on stories submitted here about China. I especially wish that more of those participants were old enough to have direct personal memories of the Cultural Revolution period and personal travel to both sides of the Taiwan Strait. The article kindly submitted here reports the thoughts of a British space scientist (not a Sinologist): "He believes China could have astronauts on the lunar surface by 2025." I will make a testable prediction here, which I hope all of us live to see confirmed or disconfirmed. China will not have astronauts (the Chinese term is "taikonauts") on the lunar surface as part of a Chinese national space mission by 2025. (By contrast, I think it is barely possible, but not particularly likely, that an international space mission with a crew from several countries may return astronauts to the lunar surface by that year.) As China democratizes, which is something I fully expect to happen between now and then, China will readjust its national policy priorities. The big priority for China in the next decade will be opening up the political system to more dissent and more effective participation by the masses, especially the rural masses who make up the majority of the population, and avoiding the "middle-income trap" of economic growth stagnating while China is still a relatively poor country on a per-capita basis. China has a lot of issues to work on that are a lot more important than putting taikonauts on the moon as part of a Chinese national space mission.

wisty 13y ago
They're cancelling the pointless one child policy. Hukou's will go at some point in the near future, which will help a lot of the rural majority (most of the working-age ones live in big cities, but only semi-officially). So they are taking some steps in the right direction. Just as long as they don't have to give up any power. > avoiding the "middle-income trap" of economic growth stagnating http://i.imgur.com/flymMWZ.png http://i.imgur.com/flymMWZ.png - if they can avoid a crisis in the next 2 years, I'll be surprised. On the whole moon thing ... it's 10 billion a year for 10 years. From this article (http://www.tealeafnation.com/2013/04/a-breakdown-of-chinas-trillion-dollar-budget/ http://www.tealeafnation.com/2013/04/a-breakdown-of-chinas-t...), China spends about 150 billion (US) per year on defence. And a truly ungodly amount on "payments of unspecified or unknown purposes", by local governments.
- blah32497 13y ago
  How is the one child policy pointless? Isn't the point to keep population growth in check? Hasn't it worked?
  - wisty 13y ago
    No ... it hasn't worked. Well, it works a little, but other strategies (propaganda, all kinds of readily available birth control) work better. Economic growth works the best. If you look at a graph of China's fertility rate (http://coolgeography.co.uk/Side%20bar%20Pages/Buttons/Index%20Buttons/clip_image002.gif http://coolgeography.co.uk/Side%20bar%20Pages/Buttons/Index%...), you can't even see the once child policy. Hint - it's after the really big drop. Fertility rates were trending down to about 2.0. Instead, they went down a little bit more (to about 1.8). A slight reduction in fertility rates isn't really worth all the problems it causes. It probably knocked the population down a bit, but on the flip-side there's tens of millions of poor angry young men with no families and nothing to lose. Which isn't great if you want a "harmonious society".
    - blah32497 13y ago
      "Economic growth works the best." Well I'm sure they see this as a potential long term solution (though, outside of very advanced first world countries, this doesn't seem to hold). But in such a crowded country that seems like a luxury they can't afford in the shorter term. It seems incongruous to say that the policy has no effects on fertility rates, while leaving devastating social consequences. Are you saying that if the policy was not in place some people that are having a child now would have had none ? And that families that would have children wouldn't care about their gender? I think India is a good picture of what happens if you don't implement a one child policy. They tried to convince people to have fewer children and failed miserably.
      - wisty 13y ago
        China's fertility rate just prior to OCP was lower than India's fertility rate today. The problem of high birth rates was pretty much already solved. You might be right that it's not just economic growth, though. Literacy in women is a huge factor, and one which India lagged behind on.
moocowduckquack 13y ago
the Chinese term is "taikonauts" No it isn't, the Chinese use yǔ háng yuán, or háng tiān yuán, or if providing english translations they use the term astronaut. English language news organisations outside China invented the term Taikonaut. edit - also the Chinese space program has a budget of between 0.5 and 1.5 billion dollars, depending on whose figures you believe. The national budget is between 350 billion dollars and a trillion dollars, again depending on who you believe, so the amount they spend on space doesn't seem to be that high. Now I agree that the Chinese government is pretty totalitarian, however I do not think that their space spending is a symptom of that, as if anything it is rather low for a moon shot.
avar 13y ago
> This fixation on the moon in a country with > stark poverty for most of its rural majority > is a sign of China's tyrannical government. Isn't this exactly the same as the often repeated argument (in various forms) of "why are we spending money on space when we have cancer/poverty/other social issues/etc.". I don't have the intimate knowledge on China that you do, nor do I agree with its government, but it's a country that's moving so fast to being industrialized that it has some parts that are effectively in the early 20th century, and some that are as high-tech as you can get. Don't you think China spending a relatively minuscule part of its resources on developing high-tech industries is likely to do its part in developing these rural areas that you're concerned about in the long term? As for the short term surely China is also working on those issues.
nabla9 13y ago
>country with stark poverty for most of its rural majority is a sign of China's tyrannical government China lifted more than 600 million people out of poverty between 1981 and 2004. The ongoing Chinese urbanization effort is massive. From 2010 to 2025, 300 million Chinese (little less than US population) now living in rural areas will move into cities. China has tyrannical government, but it's not incompetent like it was during the Mao era. They know that they can keep the power only as long as they keep making things better for majority of people. If they fuck up, no security apparatus can keep people from toppling them. China must ensure that China has the energy needed to reduce poverty and increase living standards. The great sucking noise in Africa is part of that, so is the conflict in the China Sea. If they look for the Moon for resources, that's not surprising.
- wisty 13y ago
  How many of those 300 million rural Chinese who are going to migrate to cities are already migrant workers? About 50% of rural Chinese (i.e. most working age rural Chinese) already spend 2-12 months working in cities.
  - rdtsc 13y ago
    It still stands that they are lifted out of poverty. Note, those people are not sent by force, they are not arrested and send to labor camps. The way the economic structure is set up, rewards them to do that. It would have been worse if they had shitty conditions in the country side _and_ no possibility to move to a city to work.
cpleppert 13y ago
>>(By contrast, I think it is barely possible, but not particularly likely, that an international space mission with a crew from several countries may return astronauts to the lunar surface by that year.) That is even less likely as no countries will spend the resources in collaboration with others(when it has already been done for starters) when the whole purpose of landing a man on the moon would be national pride. >>The big priority for China in the next decade will be opening up the political system to more dissent and more effective participation by the masses, especially the rural masses who make up the majority of the population, and avoiding the "middle-income trap" of economic growth stagnating while China is still a relatively poor country on a per-capita basis. China is already moving past the middle income gap phase, there isn't a big risk it will be stuck there. A far greater worry is economic stability and dealing with bubble forming concentrations of capital in real estate. Democratic states are fully capable of spending money on things that aren't a great use of money. India has similar goals to China and an active human spaceflight program.
barrkel 13y ago
China may have a tyrannical government, but a fixation on the moon even though stark poverty exists is not an indictment. Otherwise almost every luxury in every first-world country would be a similar personal indictment, and the US's own moon-shot would prove it too to have a tyrannical government.
austinz 13y ago
> This fixation on the moon in a country with stark poverty for most of its rural majority is a sign of China's tyrannical government. India's political system is far from that of China's, but they've been in the news lately for the preparation and launching of their Mars probe. That probe has no direct application to improving the lives of the many Indian peasants who live in 'stark poverty' as well, but it sure as hell doesn't signify anything about the Indian government's commitment (or lack of) to basic freedoms. This is a non sequitur. > I wish there were a higher percentage of participants on Hacker News who have both thorough knowledge of the language and culture and regular access to the Chinese press and mass media to comment on stories submitted here about China. I do too. Maybe we'd get a more nuanced view than the caricatures which always show up about modern China (recycled from those about Cold War China) here on a regular basis. > ...thoughts of a British space scientist (not a Sinologist) I'd trust a space scientist more than a Sinologist on this (or just about any other matter). > (the Chinese term is "taikonauts") The Chinese term is not taikonauts. 'Taikonaut' is a made up word used by English media outlets that is meaningless in Chinese (it lops off the latter half of 'tai kong', space, and splices the '-naut' suffix to the end). > The big priority for China in the next decade will be opening up the political system to more dissent and more effective participation by the masses, especially the rural masses who make up the majority of the population, and avoiding the "middle-income trap" of economic growth stagnating while China is still a relatively poor country on a per-capita basis. There is no reason China cannot do that and maintain a robust national science program at the same time. None of China's recent third plenum discussion points had anything to do with their space program; many of them involve economic reforms intended to address the urban-rural divide. To claim that their space program is anything more than an afterthought in terms of national priorities and decision-making is utterly daft.
tokenadult 13y ago
Thanks for the several interesting replies to my comment on this submission. I will first dispatch with the quibble. In the same way that "cosmonaut" (technically an English word, as it is not written in the Cyrillic alphabet) became a customary word in English-language publications (whether from the U.S.S.R. or from any other country) for referring to space voyagers from the U.S.S.R. and allied countries, the term "taikonaut" (yeah, technically an English word, as it is not written in Chinese characters) is becoming a customary word in English-language publications (whether from China[1] or from English-speaking countries[2]) for referring to space voyagers from the P.R.C. Of course the general term in English for space voyagers continues to be "astronaut,"[3] and of course the Russian language usually uses the term "космонавт" while the Chinese language usually uses the term "宇航员." (I used to hear the term "太空人" a lot when I lived in Taiwan, and I think that term is still standard there.) The interwiki links on Wikipedia make that clear enough, and that is enough of the terminological quibble. To get back to the substance here, what is different about the world in the 2010s compared to the 1960s (when I was alive already and very aware of and very supportive of the space program) is that no one had ever been to the moon back then, but now there have been twelve people who walked on the moon and collected rock samples and placed scientific instruments there, all American astronauts, so no one is going to gain a lot of new knowledge nor much new glory by going there. The significant fact that no Russian cosmonaut has ever visited the moon, even during the era of Cold War superpower rivalry, suggests that NASA's sharing of moon rock samples and lunar scientific data around the world has satisfied most country's desire for knowledge about what's on the moon: a bunch of sterile rocks not so significantly different from earth rocks. I used to read books by various authors when I was a kid with the full case for space exploration, up to and including colonization of the moon and Mars, laid out. Those books were very convincing to me in my childhood, even though those books were written in willful disregard of economic reality. I went to a high school that was named after the first man who set foot on the moon, and while I was a student there I reported my personal ambition to be the first man to set foot on Mars. (I could STILL be that man, which boggles my mind.) But over the years, I've grown up and traveled a lot and seen the world beyond the science fiction and space exploration sections of my town's public library, and while I continue to support sending out manned space probes hither and yon, and tolerate the low-return, high-expense International Space Station program, I see no need for my country or any country to send human beings outside the expensive grip of earth's gravity well until we take care of plenty of problems down here. If there has never been political will for manned moon exploration in Russia, nor any in any other country that has launched satellites since 1972, I have to think that China's program to plan for manned moon exploration is based on a glorious ignorance of economics and misplaced policy priorities in the interest of keeping the ruling party in power. All China could do on the moon with a manned mission would come at a punishingly economically inefficient cost. If China wants to impress the United States, my suggestion is that it try lifting press censorship and allow free and fair local and national elections, an example Taiwan has already given China for about two decades. That really would be an impressive sign of modernity and progress. And that would be a great contribution to the peaceful wellbeing of all humankind. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=taikonauts+site%3A.cn https://www.google.com/search?q=taikonauts+site%3A.cn [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=taikonauts https://www.google.com/search?q=taikonauts [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronaut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronaut
chj 13y ago
You're exaggerating the cost and neglecting the technology by-products from this mission. I think landing on the moon repeatedly from whatever nation on this planet should be welcomed and called money well spent. Eventually, space is where our descendants will be going after we suck the earth empty.

wisty 13y ago

They're cancelling the pointless one child policy. Hukou's will go at some point in the near future, which will help a lot of the rural majority (most of the working-age ones live in big cities, but only semi-officially). So they are taking some steps in the right direction. Just as long as they don't have to give up any power. > avoiding the "middle-income trap" of economic growth stagnating http://i.imgur.com/flymMWZ.png http://i.imgur.com/flymMWZ.png - if they can avoid a crisis in the next 2 years, I'll be surprised. On the whole moon thing ... it's 10 billion a year for 10 years. From this article (http://www.tealeafnation.com/2013/04/a-breakdown-of-chinas-trillion-dollar-budget/ http://www.tealeafnation.com/2013/04/a-breakdown-of-chinas-t...), China spends about 150 billion (US) per year on defence. And a truly ungodly amount on "payments of unspecified or unknown purposes", by local governments.

blah32497 13y ago
How is the one child policy pointless? Isn't the point to keep population growth in check? Hasn't it worked?
- wisty 13y ago
  No ... it hasn't worked. Well, it works a little, but other strategies (propaganda, all kinds of readily available birth control) work better. Economic growth works the best. If you look at a graph of China's fertility rate (http://coolgeography.co.uk/Side%20bar%20Pages/Buttons/Index%20Buttons/clip_image002.gif http://coolgeography.co.uk/Side%20bar%20Pages/Buttons/Index%...), you can't even see the once child policy. Hint - it's after the really big drop. Fertility rates were trending down to about 2.0. Instead, they went down a little bit more (to about 1.8). A slight reduction in fertility rates isn't really worth all the problems it causes. It probably knocked the population down a bit, but on the flip-side there's tens of millions of poor angry young men with no families and nothing to lose. Which isn't great if you want a "harmonious society".
  - blah32497 13y ago
    "Economic growth works the best." Well I'm sure they see this as a potential long term solution (though, outside of very advanced first world countries, this doesn't seem to hold). But in such a crowded country that seems like a luxury they can't afford in the shorter term. It seems incongruous to say that the policy has no effects on fertility rates, while leaving devastating social consequences. Are you saying that if the policy was not in place some people that are having a child now would have had none ? And that families that would have children wouldn't care about their gender? I think India is a good picture of what happens if you don't implement a one child policy. They tried to convince people to have fewer children and failed miserably.
    - wisty 13y ago
      China's fertility rate just prior to OCP was lower than India's fertility rate today. The problem of high birth rates was pretty much already solved. You might be right that it's not just economic growth, though. Literacy in women is a huge factor, and one which India lagged behind on.

moocowduckquack 13y ago

the Chinese term is "taikonauts" No it isn't, the Chinese use yǔ háng yuán, or háng tiān yuán, or if providing english translations they use the term astronaut. English language news organisations outside China invented the term Taikonaut. edit - also the Chinese space program has a budget of between 0.5 and 1.5 billion dollars, depending on whose figures you believe. The national budget is between 350 billion dollars and a trillion dollars, again depending on who you believe, so the amount they spend on space doesn't seem to be that high. Now I agree that the Chinese government is pretty totalitarian, however I do not think that their space spending is a symptom of that, as if anything it is rather low for a moon shot.

avar 13y ago

> This fixation on the moon in a country with > stark poverty for most of its rural majority > is a sign of China's tyrannical government. Isn't this exactly the same as the often repeated argument (in various forms) of "why are we spending money on space when we have cancer/poverty/other social issues/etc.". I don't have the intimate knowledge on China that you do, nor do I agree with its government, but it's a country that's moving so fast to being industrialized that it has some parts that are effectively in the early 20th century, and some that are as high-tech as you can get. Don't you think China spending a relatively minuscule part of its resources on developing high-tech industries is likely to do its part in developing these rural areas that you're concerned about in the long term? As for the short term surely China is also working on those issues.

nabla9 13y ago

>country with stark poverty for most of its rural majority is a sign of China's tyrannical government China lifted more than 600 million people out of poverty between 1981 and 2004. The ongoing Chinese urbanization effort is massive. From 2010 to 2025, 300 million Chinese (little less than US population) now living in rural areas will move into cities. China has tyrannical government, but it's not incompetent like it was during the Mao era. They know that they can keep the power only as long as they keep making things better for majority of people. If they fuck up, no security apparatus can keep people from toppling them. China must ensure that China has the energy needed to reduce poverty and increase living standards. The great sucking noise in Africa is part of that, so is the conflict in the China Sea. If they look for the Moon for resources, that's not surprising.

wisty 13y ago
How many of those 300 million rural Chinese who are going to migrate to cities are already migrant workers? About 50% of rural Chinese (i.e. most working age rural Chinese) already spend 2-12 months working in cities.
- rdtsc 13y ago
  It still stands that they are lifted out of poverty. Note, those people are not sent by force, they are not arrested and send to labor camps. The way the economic structure is set up, rewards them to do that. It would have been worse if they had shitty conditions in the country side _and_ no possibility to move to a city to work.

cpleppert 13y ago

>>(By contrast, I think it is barely possible, but not particularly likely, that an international space mission with a crew from several countries may return astronauts to the lunar surface by that year.) That is even less likely as no countries will spend the resources in collaboration with others(when it has already been done for starters) when the whole purpose of landing a man on the moon would be national pride. >>The big priority for China in the next decade will be opening up the political system to more dissent and more effective participation by the masses, especially the rural masses who make up the majority of the population, and avoiding the "middle-income trap" of economic growth stagnating while China is still a relatively poor country on a per-capita basis. China is already moving past the middle income gap phase, there isn't a big risk it will be stuck there. A far greater worry is economic stability and dealing with bubble forming concentrations of capital in real estate. Democratic states are fully capable of spending money on things that aren't a great use of money. India has similar goals to China and an active human spaceflight program.

barrkel 13y ago

China may have a tyrannical government, but a fixation on the moon even though stark poverty exists is not an indictment. Otherwise almost every luxury in every first-world country would be a similar personal indictment, and the US's own moon-shot would prove it too to have a tyrannical government.

austinz 13y ago

> This fixation on the moon in a country with stark poverty for most of its rural majority is a sign of China's tyrannical government. India's political system is far from that of China's, but they've been in the news lately for the preparation and launching of their Mars probe. That probe has no direct application to improving the lives of the many Indian peasants who live in 'stark poverty' as well, but it sure as hell doesn't signify anything about the Indian government's commitment (or lack of) to basic freedoms. This is a non sequitur. > I wish there were a higher percentage of participants on Hacker News who have both thorough knowledge of the language and culture and regular access to the Chinese press and mass media to comment on stories submitted here about China. I do too. Maybe we'd get a more nuanced view than the caricatures which always show up about modern China (recycled from those about Cold War China) here on a regular basis. > ...thoughts of a British space scientist (not a Sinologist) I'd trust a space scientist more than a Sinologist on this (or just about any other matter). > (the Chinese term is "taikonauts") The Chinese term is not taikonauts. 'Taikonaut' is a made up word used by English media outlets that is meaningless in Chinese (it lops off the latter half of 'tai kong', space, and splices the '-naut' suffix to the end). > The big priority for China in the next decade will be opening up the political system to more dissent and more effective participation by the masses, especially the rural masses who make up the majority of the population, and avoiding the "middle-income trap" of economic growth stagnating while China is still a relatively poor country on a per-capita basis. There is no reason China cannot do that and maintain a robust national science program at the same time. None of China's recent third plenum discussion points had anything to do with their space program; many of them involve economic reforms intended to address the urban-rural divide. To claim that their space program is anything more than an afterthought in terms of national priorities and decision-making is utterly daft.

tokenadult 13y ago

Thanks for the several interesting replies to my comment on this submission. I will first dispatch with the quibble. In the same way that "cosmonaut" (technically an English word, as it is not written in the Cyrillic alphabet) became a customary word in English-language publications (whether from the U.S.S.R. or from any other country) for referring to space voyagers from the U.S.S.R. and allied countries, the term "taikonaut" (yeah, technically an English word, as it is not written in Chinese characters) is becoming a customary word in English-language publications (whether from China[1] or from English-speaking countries[2]) for referring to space voyagers from the P.R.C. Of course the general term in English for space voyagers continues to be "astronaut,"[3] and of course the Russian language usually uses the term "космонавт" while the Chinese language usually uses the term "宇航员." (I used to hear the term "太空人" a lot when I lived in Taiwan, and I think that term is still standard there.) The interwiki links on Wikipedia make that clear enough, and that is enough of the terminological quibble. To get back to the substance here, what is different about the world in the 2010s compared to the 1960s (when I was alive already and very aware of and very supportive of the space program) is that no one had ever been to the moon back then, but now there have been twelve people who walked on the moon and collected rock samples and placed scientific instruments there, all American astronauts, so no one is going to gain a lot of new knowledge nor much new glory by going there. The significant fact that no Russian cosmonaut has ever visited the moon, even during the era of Cold War superpower rivalry, suggests that NASA's sharing of moon rock samples and lunar scientific data around the world has satisfied most country's desire for knowledge about what's on the moon: a bunch of sterile rocks not so significantly different from earth rocks. I used to read books by various authors when I was a kid with the full case for space exploration, up to and including colonization of the moon and Mars, laid out. Those books were very convincing to me in my childhood, even though those books were written in willful disregard of economic reality. I went to a high school that was named after the first man who set foot on the moon, and while I was a student there I reported my personal ambition to be the first man to set foot on Mars. (I could STILL be that man, which boggles my mind.) But over the years, I've grown up and traveled a lot and seen the world beyond the science fiction and space exploration sections of my town's public library, and while I continue to support sending out manned space probes hither and yon, and tolerate the low-return, high-expense International Space Station program, I see no need for my country or any country to send human beings outside the expensive grip of earth's gravity well until we take care of plenty of problems down here. If there has never been political will for manned moon exploration in Russia, nor any in any other country that has launched satellites since 1972, I have to think that China's program to plan for manned moon exploration is based on a glorious ignorance of economics and misplaced policy priorities in the interest of keeping the ruling party in power. All China could do on the moon with a manned mission would come at a punishingly economically inefficient cost. If China wants to impress the United States, my suggestion is that it try lifting press censorship and allow free and fair local and national elections, an example Taiwan has already given China for about two decades. That really would be an impressive sign of modernity and progress. And that would be a great contribution to the peaceful wellbeing of all humankind. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=taikonauts+site%3A.cn https://www.google.com/search?q=taikonauts+site%3A.cn [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=taikonauts https://www.google.com/search?q=taikonauts [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronaut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronaut

chj 13y ago

You're exaggerating the cost and neglecting the technology by-products from this mission. I think landing on the moon repeatedly from whatever nation on this planet should be welcomed and called money well spent. Eventually, space is where our descendants will be going after we suck the earth empty.