Red Sky at Morning

“The moon can be the top height for environment monitoring with vital military importance.” – The People’s Daily

A friend forwarded me a crazy article in Fast Company that is essentially an ode to the power of the Communist Party and their supposedly peace-loving space program: http://www.fastcompany.com/1750093/what-chinas-new-space-station-means-for-china-and-the-world

Now, space policy is my other love and I’m openly sympathetic to those that share the dream of expanding mankind’s horizons. However, this piece reads like the naïve dream of a pre-teen girl with a crush and it makes me openly wonder exactly what planet author Christopher Mims is currently living on. At one point he actually suggests that “Red China on the Red Planet” is “poetic!” How about “nauseating?” I’d assume the Communist Party’s victims from Tiananmen to Tibet can only be horrified at the idea of extraterrestrial expansion of China’s new breed of National Socialism.

Yes, Ouyang Ziyuan is an inspiring and brilliant scientist – just like the US educated founder of China’s space program Qian Xuesen was – but it doesn’t make a difference how inspired a scientist is if he reports to criminals! These twisted thugs who jail artists and Nobel prize winners and persecute the Falun Gong have never gone anywhere in peace. Just ask the Uighars, the Vietnamese, or China’s new slaves in Africa. Mim glows with special joy that China is “a nation led by engineers.” As though educated people with wrenches have never done the world wrong.

Americans should know better because we’ve been here before. Hu and his Boys from Beijing are simply one small step beyond the Nazis and Ouyang and his space program leave us no better off than if Von Braun were still reporting to Herr Hitler. That inspired, sci-fi loving genius was willing to sell his soul to the devil to build his rocket machines and Quyang is no different.

Mims continues to express his disdain for free enterprise (are you reading your own stuff Fast Company?) by heaping praise on the Communist five-year plan system and even suggests that China’s government designed microprocessors will out do Intel. Funny, the thing that will surely undo Intel, is further investment in and cooperation with a nation that has no more respect for intellectual property than it does for its own people. Former Intel Chair Andy Grove knows this well:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_28/b4186048358596.htm

More to the point, I predict America’s emerging private space firms like SpaceX and Orbital could kick China’s government-run butts out of orbit, given a fair chance and a free market (Republican congress are you listening?).

How did Mims and Fast Company get so deluded? The Chinese are happy to tell us if we but listen. Consider this juicy quote from a Chinese military strategist:

“Our future space weapons program should be low profile and ‘intense internally’ but relaxed in external appearance to maintain our good international image and position.”

If you don’t want to sleep tonight, or if to paraphrase LBJ you don’t want “to sleep by the light of a communist moon” read on at:

http://www.uscc.gov/researchpapers/2007/FINAL_REPORT_1-19-2007_REVISED_BY_MPP.pdf

While it is a Nobel goal to see all of humanity represented in the solar system, there are some ideologies we should happily leave behind and Chinese National Socialism is one of them.

If any of you are still dreaming of seeing a peacefully rising China lead the way to the stars please read “Death by China” now shipping on Kindle and Apple iBook or visit www.gregautry.us.

–       Greg Autry teaches Macroeconomics at the Merage School of Business, UC Irvine and is co-author (with Peter Navarro) of the new book “Death by China” www.gregautry.us