Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

the Great Leap UpWarD: ChINa’S hUMaN SpaCeFLIGht
prOGraM aND ChINeSe NatIONaL IDeNtItY
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science fction writing, notably that of Max Valier (someone who did not truly
even understand the principles of rocketry) ultimately led to the rocket being
forged into a weapon of war. 19 Just previous to Neufeld’s work, historian Walter
McDougall in his 1985 book pulitzer prize-winning book . . . the Heavens and
the Earth: The Politics of the Space Age (New York: alfred a. Knopf) explored
the critically important associations between literary and social movements in
tsarist russia and the Soviet Union and subsequent technological developments
related to rockets and spacefight. recent excellent studies of the cultural
context of the roots of the russian space program have also been made by
James andrews 20 and Slava Gerovitch. 21 Given the fertility of such studies for
our understanding of the history of spacefight within the national cultures of
the Soviet Union, Germany, and america, one must ask, how would a similar
analysis of Chinese culture inform our understanding of the meaning of
space exploration to the Chinese? to date, very few books and articles on the
Chinese space program ofer anything like the penetrating insights that have
been provided for the United States, Germany, and russia. 22
Similarly, just as there is no way to fathom what the U.S. space program has
meant to american society over the past half century without understanding what
americans have wanted from their heroes—“space” heroes and otherwise—
there is also no way to understand what the Chinese are after in space without
understanding the iconography that has developed around their y’uhángyuán
or “universe navigators.” If the particular types of heroic iconography that
have come to surround China’s frst space traveler, Shenzhou V’s Yang Liwei,
is any sort of reliable indicator, Chinese society by 2003 was well on its way
toward successfully mixing a rising sense of pragmatic nationalism, communist
ideology, traditional Confucian values, and drive for economic and high-tech
industrial competitiveness into an efective recipe for an expansive program of
human spacefight. 23 evidently the Chinese space program has been tapping into
19. Technology and Culture, Vol.
31, No. 4 (October 1990): 725-52.
20. See James t. andrews, The Bolshevik State, Public Science, and the Popular Imagination in Soviet Russia,
1917–1934, and Visions of Space Flight: K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Russian Popular Culture, and the Roots
of Soviet Cosmonautics 1857-1957, published in 2003 and 2007, respectively, both by texas a&M
University press.
21. See Slava Gerovitch, “‘New Soviet Man’ Inside Machine: human engineering, Spacecraft
Design, and the Construction of Communism,” OSIRIS, vol. 22 (2007): 135-5, and “Love-hate
for Man-Machine Metaphors in Soviet physiology: From pavlov to ‘physiological Cybernetics,’”
Science in Context, vol. 15, no. 2 (2002): 339-374.
22. the most complete treatment of the Chinese space program can be found in Brian harvey,
China’s Space Program: From Conception to Manned Spacefight (Chichester, U.K.: Springer, 2004),
but the book sufers from its lack of historical and cultural perspective.
23. On the Chinese enthusiasm for their frst countryman to make a spacefight, see my article, “the
taikonaut as Icon: the Cultural and political Signifcance of Yang Liwei, China’s First Space
traveler,” in The Societal Impact of Spacefight (NaSa Special publication-2007-4801, 2007), eds.