‘Get off our duff’: In race to outer space, China is closing fast

Welcome, China Watchers. This week’s guest host is Bryan Bender, POLITICO’s senior national correspondent who covers defense and pilots POLITICO Space, a weekly take on astropolitics. Prior to joining POLITICO as defense editor in 2015, Bryan was the Pentagon correspondent for the Boston Globe for 14 years and the chief Washington correspondent for Jane’s Defence Weekly. Over to you, Bryan. — John Yearwood, global news editor

Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is expected to blast into space on Tuesday, nine days behind fellow billionaire Richard Branson. The billionaires have gotten most of the attention but there’s a bigger space race heating up — one between the United States and China that could determine the dominant space power of the coming decades.

In policy circles, when you hear talk about the “new space race,” it is almost always uttered in the same breath as China — not Russia, which was the United States’ main competitor in the first era of the space age.

Beijing has logged a series of head-spinning achievements in the past few years. It now has a fully manned space station from which Chinese taikonauts just conducted their first space walk. It has retrieved samples from the moon and orbited a remote spacecraft around it. A Chinese rover is operating on the Martian surface alongside two from the United States. Meanwhile, Beijing is designing a reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle like SpaceX’s Starship for deep space missions and recently inked a partnership with Russia to build a research base on the moon.

Unlike the Cold War race between Washington and Moscow, however, this expanding competition is about far more than planting a flag: It’s about seizing the high ground for military advantage and turning space into a commercial engine that could change life on Earth.

The Pentagon recently reported to Congress that Beijing “has devoted significant resources to growing all aspects of its space program, from military space applications to civil applications such as profit-generating launches, scientific endeavors, and space exploration.” And a top admiral this month warned that China is “on the march” toward developing offensive weapons that could jam or destroy satellites in orbit.

The consequences of China’s first anti-satellite test in 2007 still endure, due to the thousands of pieces of space debris it created when destroying one of its own satellites that still pose a threat to spacecraft in low-Earth orbit.

How did we get here? Scott Pace, who served as executive secretary of the White House National Space Council in the Trump administration, likes to cite a line from Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” to describe how Beijing went from an also-ran to a space juggernaut. A character in the novel asks, “How did you go bankrupt?” The reply: “Gradually, then suddenly.”

“That could apply to the West’s appreciation of China’s growing space capabilities and ambitions,” says Pace, now director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University.

How worried should Washington be? If you talk to those studying the national security implications of a preeminent Chinese space power, the U.S. is at serious risk of losing the advantage and putting its military and economic security in jeopardy, if it doesn’t get its act together.

A major reason is that the Chinese, by all accounts, have a comprehensive strategy and the will, from the Communist Party leadership on down, to execute it. The Chinese government has laid out a vision for a “Silk Road” information corridor in space to parallel its “Belt and Road” trade initiative on Earth. Meanwhile Washington, the argument goes, is bogged down in petty partisan brawling.

“The Party has control over vast state resources and can plan long term on which sectors to fund,” says Namrata Goswami, a space policy scholar and co-author of “Scramble for the Skies: The Great Power Competition to Control the Resources of Outer Space.”

The sectors, she says, include space resource utilization like mining on the moon and developing renewable energy via space-based solar power, as well as leap-frogging in high-tech areas such as artificial intelligence, robotics and quantum computing.

“U.S. policymakers have failed to grasp that this is part of China building a space infrastructure that would benefit and help it overtake the U.S. by 2049,” she says. “President Xi Jinping has included space as part of his focus on turning China from manufacturing into a high tech and innovation sector focused on services.”

Indeed, some of Beijing’s space goals for the near future, if they come to fruition, could give it significantly more thrust.

“They will test in-space power beaming, land reusable rockets, establish a lunar research station, build a solar power satellite prototype, test lunar 3-D printing, capture a small asteroid and return it to Earth, and fly nuclear powered spacecraft,” says retired Air Force Lt. Col. Peter Garretson, a space strategist who is now a senior fellow in defense studies at the American Foreign Policy Council.

These ventures are “aimed at creating the building blocks for an Earth-independent supply chain to become an in-space industrial giant and dominant space power,” he adds.

Will China treat space differently? Pace says he has few illusions that Beijing will treat space any differently than economic and security domains here on Earth. The United States must protect its lead — and even widen it, he says — given Beijing’s aggressive behavior in the South China Sea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and in cyberspace.

“Will Chinese behavior in commercial space be markedly different than in other commercial sectors?” Pace asks. “Probably not. Will Chinese behavior in outer space be different than in other shared domains, such as the oceans? Maybe.”

Goswami also stresses that unlike the United States, one cannot separate China’s military endeavors in space from its civilian pursuits. They are one and the same and both run by the People’s Liberation Army.

“U.S. policymakers fail to grasp that China’s space institutional structure is unlike NASA and U.S. space institutional structures that clearly divide civil from military and are based on transparency,” she says. “China’s space institutional structure including its civilian space structures comes under PLA direction,” she says, and it is led by the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo and Central Military Commission.

Garretson believes Washington needs to be concerned that the Communist Party is “using space as a platform to create alternate governance mechanisms and poach U.S. partners” in space such as Russia.

‘Need to get off our duff’: NASA administrator Bill Nelson has seized on China’s recent successes to urge Congress to step up funding for some of the space agency’s signature programs, calling Beijing “a very aggressive competitor.”

He said China’s successful mission to send a spacecraft to moon, in particular, adds “a new element as to whether or not we want to get serious” about returning American astronauts to the surface in the next few years.

“They’re going to be landing humans on the moon,” Nelson recently testified. “That should tell us something about our need to get off our duff and get our Human Landing System program going vigorously.”

In a recent interview with POLITICO, Nelson was particularly critical of China’s recent disregard for international norms in allowing a large space rocket to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere uncontrolled, risking loss of life and property damage, saying “there is no excuse for that.”

But there is a growing consensus that the U.S. vision in space should be about far more than moon missions and space tourism.

Last year’s National Defense Authorization Act mandates a report from the White House National Space Council on the U.S.-China competition, including recommendations on what more needs to be done to stay ahead.

For example, it calls for an assessment of the “extraction of space-based precious minerals, on-site exploitation of space-based natural resources, and the use of space-based solar power.”

Garretson sees an urgent need for the United States to develop “a clear whole-of-nation plan for the industrial development of space.”

The good news: In Washington’s highly polarized political environment, there is broad bipartisan agreement that the United States needs to step up its game.

Pace says he sees wide recognition that if the United States is not more attuned and active, China is on a path to play a major role in shaping the character of the new space age and determining whether democratic or autocratic norms prevail.

“It is a concern that has led the United States and its allies to seek to reduce reliance on Chinese supply chains for telecommunication products, medical supplies and rare earth minerals,” he said. “Space is not separable from the rest of U.S. perceptions of China.”

Take a deep breath: Not everyone is ready to declare the sky is falling yet.

“China is definitely advancing its capabilities and the relative power balance is shifting,” says Brian Weeden, director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, which has sought ways to open a dialogue with Beijing on common principles for operating safely and peacefully in space. “But that is generally because they started from a much lower point than the U.S. did.”

“I don’t quite buy into the China hype,” he adds, “but I am concerned.”

Is there room for cooperation? During the Cold War space race with Russia, tensions were greatly reduced through cooperation, shielding space from the nuclear standoff on Earth. For decades the American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts have lived and worked in space together in the name of peace.

But the so-called Wolf Amendment bars NASA from cooperating with China on space without congressional approval and there is currently little support for overturning it.

“All that said, space cooperation with China is possible and, within limits, desirable, just as space cooperation with the Soviet Union was possible,” says Pace.

He pointed out that: “The United States and China are often able to work together constructively in multilateral fora such as the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space and the International Telecommunications Union.”

But what might cooperation with China in space look like? “The level of political trust needed for joint human spaceflight is unlikely to occur anytime soon,” Pace believes. “But it may be possible to meet taikonauts on the south pole of the Moon.”

And now, back to your regular China Watcher programming…

TRANSLATING WASHINGTON

— Pence takes on Biden, China: Former Vice President Mike Pence sketched a lurid portrait of the fraught state of U.S.-China relations on Wednesday in his first public appearance in Washington, D.C. since January 20. In a Heritage Foundation speech that name-checked Cuba, Chairman Mao Zedong and Henry Kissinger, Pence evoked ghosts of the Cold War and included a Reagan-esque warning that the ruling Chinese Communist Party is dedicated to the creation of an “evil empire.”

Pence predictably larded praise on the Trump administration’s China policy, while alleging that China’s leadership “senses weakness” in a Biden administration that Pence said is “already rolling over to Communist China.” The bulk of Pence’s speech was prescriptive, urging the Biden administration to take steps to counter China’s perceived threat through various measures, including greater investment in U.S. naval power in the Indo-Pacific, decoupling national security-sensitive segments of the U.S. economy from China and deepening economic ties to Taiwan.

Pence also asserted in his speech that U.S. democracy is under threat from “powerful business interests and celebrities in our own country who openly aid and abet the Communist regime.” Pence added that Beijing has “coerced top CEOs, athletes and entertainers … in not only withholding criticism of the Chinese regime, but in many cases actively singing their praises.” Pence named no names except that of Nike’s CEO, John Donahoe, by repeating Donahoe’s January 2021 assertion that “Nike is a brand that is of China and for China.”

— U.S. intensifies Xinjiang scrutiny: If the Chinese government had hopes that the Biden administration planned to ease up on trade and corporate sanctions linked to concerns about human rights abuses in Xinjiang, the past week has been a rude awakening. On Tuesday, the State Department issued an update to a Trump administration warning on the legal risks to U.S. businesses via “supply chain and investment links” to Xinjiang entities implicated in human rights abuses, including forced labor. The updated Xinjiang Supply Chain Business Advisory includes resources for U.S. companies, including advice for investors in Chinese firms linked to Xinjiang’s pervasive surveillance systems and due diligence information for banks and other financial companies.

That warning followed the latest in a flurry of U.S. State Department documentation of severe human rights abuses in China’s Xinjiang region. The latest is the State Department’s 2021 Wiesel Report, an annual summary of the efforts of the U.S. government to “prevent and respond to atrocities from July 2020 to May 2021.” China shared top billing in the report with countries, including Myanmar, Syria, Iraq and South Sudan due to Chinese government policies toward its Muslim Uyghur and other religious minorities in Xinjiang. Chinese foreign affairs ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian responded to the report by dismissing it as “a joke” hinged to “absurd logic.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. Commerce Department announced on Friday that it will add 19 companies to its trade blacklist for enabling human rights abuses in China or assisting its military, reports POLITICO’s Gavin Bade. Those 19 companies include 14 based in China that have facilitated the government’s “campaign of repression, mass detention and high-technology surveillance” against ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. The other five entities were added for “directly supporting” the Chinese military’s modernization programs related to lasers.

An additional four firms were blacklisted for “doing business with other firms that had already been sanctioned by the US,” the South China Morning Post reports.

— Weibo rankled over Covid rating: It started innocently enough. Bloomberg recently ranked 53 countries on a scale of “The Best and Worst Places to Be as The World Finally Reopens.” The U.S. took the top spot, while China ranked eighth, behind Spain and ahead of the United Kingdom. Now the hashtag “United States claiming to be the world’s number one anti-epidemic,” complete with a graphic of Lady Liberty hooked up to an oxygen mask, is trending on Weibo with more than 3.6 million shares. The hashtag has attracted hundreds of acidic comments, including “A country with more than 33 million [Covid infections] and more than 600,000 deaths must be the number one!”

— Weibo wants Trump to join: Still smarting from the failure last month of his short-lived blog, former President Donald Trump now has a fallback if his new social media platform Gettr flops: an account on China’s (heavily censored and surveilled) answer to Twitter, Sina Weibo. A Weibo survey last week of the platform’s users’ attitudes toward Trump joining their ranks revealed that almost 80 percent of the 4,500 respondents “very much hope” that Trump will sign up for the service. Trump-related topics trended 589 times on Weibo in 2020, according to the Global Times, putting him at the top of the list of the site’s top 20 trending topics last year.

— Canadian court prolongs Huawei stand-off: A Vancouver, British Columbia, court ruling on Friday has ensured the continuation of a bitter standoff between Canada and China over the Canadian government’s detention of Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou. Meng has been under house arrest in Vancouver since December 2018 due to an extradition request by the U.S. government, which asserts that Meng undertook fraudulent banking transactions designed to obscure Huawei’s violation of sanctions against Iran. The court denied a petition by Meng’s lawyers for the submission as evidence of 300 documents sourced from the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited. Meng’s defense team asserts the documents can demonstrate the falsity of the U.S. extradition request’s claim that Meng misrepresented Huawei’s Iranian business dealings to HSBC.

— EU Parliament wants Beijing Games boycott: Expect a plethora of empty seats in the European Union’s rink-side reserved seating at the Beijing Winter Olympics next February if the European Parliament has its way. The EU Parliament last week issued a resolution calling for a boycott of official spectators “unless the Chinese government demonstrates a verifiable improvement in the human rights situation in Hong Kong, the Xinjiang Uyghur Region and elsewhere in China.” Expect more such pointed international attention to the upcoming Beijing Games and their relation to China’s human rights record as soon as the Tokyo Olympics end on Aug. 8.

— Report: HK security law imperils business: A paper released last week by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation paints a sobering portrait of Hong Kong’s future viability as an international business center. The report, “The Risks for International Business under the Hong Kong National Security Law,” warns that the territory’s Beijing-imposed national security law’s combination of expansive categories of sectors subject to national security scrutiny and the law’s “extraterritorial reach” means that “individuals and companies can be criminally liable for documents, work, or activities conducted outside of Hong Kong that nevertheless ‘endanger’ PRC national security.”

But not everyone agrees with the report. In an article published Wednesday in Foreign Affairs magazine, Kurt Tong, former U.S. consul general in Hong Kong, argues that the conventional wisdom about the impact of China’s crackdown is wrong. China won’t pay much of an economic price, he writes.

“In the first quarter of 2021, as Hong Kong authorities rounded up unprecedented numbers of political prisoners and Beijing announced a sweeping dilution of the city’s electoral institutions, Hong Kong’s stock exchange ranked fourth globally in the number of initial public offerings and second in the volume of proceeds from such deals. Foreign banks operating in Hong Kong have gone on a hiring spree, eyeing new opportunities to invest in China’s economy, » according to Tong. « And despite much media hype, the trickle of assets that skittish Hong Kong families moved to Singapore or elsewhere in the aftermath of China’s imposition, in July 2020, of a stringent new National Security Law in Hong Kong has been dwarfed by a steady flow of capital pouring into the city from mainland China and foreign countries. »

Thanks to: Ben Pauker, Phelim Kine, Luiza Ch. Savage, Matt Kaminski and editor John Yearwood.

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