Chinas Spatial Disintegration

During the period of economic policy reform from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, China experimented with new forms of socialism, embraced new technologies, introduced reforms to rural and industrial productive enterprises, and the country opened up to the Western world. By looking at issues associated with regional development, transport, population distribution, and the large cities, this volume demonstrates how the space economy responded to economic reforms, as well as acting as a "shock absorber" for some of the more profound swings in policy. This study should be of interest to scholars in geography, urban studies, and China studies.

The Chinese government is using space power to increase its influence at home and abroad and hopes to leverage the political, economic, and military benefits of space to become a great power. The ambivalent nature of the U.S.-China relationship, however, assures that over the long term China's rise as a space power will present challenges to the United States. Militarily, China's improved remote sensing capabilities and launch tempos require the U.S. military to prepare to counteract China's use of space in a potential conflict over Taiwan. Commercially, China's lower labor costs and mercantilist approach to space could establish China as a competitive market force. Politically, U.S. diplomats must recognize the role Chinese space activities plays in diplomacy and be prepared to ameliorate cooperative activities that impinge on U.S. national security. Despite these drawbacks, cooperation with China cannot be ruled out. Cooperation can improve scientific research, increase safety, and make an opaque program more transparent, but should not directly improve China's military or commercial capabilities. Consequently, the U.S. response to China's rise as a space power should take a balanced approach in which challenges are managed and opportunities exploited.

As China becomes more and more market-oriented, the spatial development dilemmas it encounters are more and more like those one finds in capitalist nations. This book, an updated edition of China's Spatial Economy (OUP 1990), both illustrates and examines the growing differences between and within the increasingly diverse regions of China. The contributors to this volume look to the future of China's major economic regions in light of the numerous problems this country now faces. Also, they show how these problems are affecting various parts of China in different ways.

The People's Republic of China (PRC) has made significant advances in its space program and is emerging as a space power. With preservation of its monopoly on power as an overriding goal, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) bolsters its legitimacy through achievements in space. The Chinese military manages China's space program and there is significant overlap between civilian and military space operations, which mutually reinforce one another. An increasingly sophisticated R&D and industrial establishment supplies the People's Liberation Army (PLA) with military space systems. The PLA General Armaments Department (GAD) appears to oversee space systems acquisitions and operations. Other important organizations in the space program include the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) and China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC). As a rough NASA counterpart, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) facilitates international exchanges and cooperative programs with other space-faring nations.

At the turn of the century, competition in space shifted from being between the United States and the Soviet Union to being between the United States and China. Since its first manned mission in 2003, China’s space program has accelerated dramatically. China completed the BeiDou System satellite constellation in 2020, its own Global Navigation Satellite System, sent a rover to the far side of the Moon in 2019 and to Mars in 2021, and is assembling its own space station with completion targeted in 2022. While the United States is still dominant in space, China’s rapid development concerns the U.S. military. Due to the military-civil dual-use nature of space activities, as China’s space capability develops it can also be viewed as development of its military capability in space, thereby complicating the geopolitical competition between the United States and China. The question that emerges is: How will China’s space capabilities enhance its global influence? More specifically, will BDS shift the current power distribution between the two countries toward China in the South China Sea, a crucial hot spot over which the two powers compete? In this study I try to answer such questions by focusing on the Belt and Road Initiative Spatial Information Corridor, which includes China’s most obvious geopolitical space-related activities and provides space-related services to members of the Belt and Road Initiative. BRI–SIC projects are the least studied of all BRI projects. By conducting a risk-benefit assessment of 108 BRI–SIC projects, I explore a more specific question: Should the United States and its allies be concerned with China’s global expansion of spacerelated activities in the name of BRI–SIC? This question is answered affirmatively based on this study’s assessment. Concerns among the United States and its allies ought not stem from the BRI–SIC being designed to benefit China’s global military strategy due to the military-civil dual-use nature inherent to space-related activities and technologies. Rather, concerns are due to the economic and political influence that BRI–SIC can provide to China. BRI–SIC projects benefit their host nations. Specifically, 100% of the identifiable projects are beneficial infrastructure enablers, and 76.6% can strengthen the human security of the host. While some projects carry potentially high national security risks, developing countries acting as host nations are undeterred, as the priority is to develop the economy. China is able to convert the beneficial nature of the BRI–SIC into leverage over the recipient host nations to enable China to establish its own ecosystem in the space-related data/information domain. Currently, the United States and its allies need not be concerned that the BRI–SIC enhances China’s military or spacefaring capabilities. Rather, they need to be aware that the BRI–SIC is sowing seeds for Chinese space-related vendors, particularly for those dealing with the BeiDou System, to permeate BRI markets in the future. Because BRI host nations possess huge market potential due to faster rates of economic development and greater vulnerability to climate change, China is positioned to harvest the fruits of this endeavor unless the United States and its allies provide attractive alternatives to host countries."--Abstract.

For more than a century, no US adversary or coalition of adversaries - not Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the Soviet Union - has ever reached sixty percent of US GDP. China is the sole exception, and it is fast emerging into a global superpower that could rival, if not eclipse, the United States. What does China want, does it have a grand strategy to achieve it, and what should the United States do about it? In The Long Game, Rush Doshi draws from a rich base of Chinese primary sources, including decades worth of party documents, leaked materials, memoirs by party leaders, and a careful analysis of China's conduct to provide a history of China's grand strategy since the end of the Cold War. Taking readers behind the Party's closed doors, he uncovers Beijing's long, methodical game to displace America from its hegemonic position in both the East Asia regional and global orders through three sequential "strategies of displacement." Beginning in the 1980s, China focused for two decades on "hiding capabilities and biding time." After the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, it became more assertive regionally, following a policy of "actively accomplishing something." Finally, in the aftermath populist elections of 2016, China shifted to an even more aggressive strategy for undermining US hegemony, adopting the phrase "great changes unseen in century." After charting how China's long game has evolved, Doshi offers a comprehensive yet asymmetric plan for an effective US response. Ironically, his proposed approach takes a page from Beijing's own strategic playbook to undermine China's ambitions and strengthen American order without competing dollar-for-dollar, ship-for-ship, or loan-for-loan.

This book examines the formation of the Chinese empire through its reorganization and reinterpretation of its basic spatial units: the human body, the household, the city, the region, and the world. The central theme of the book is the way all these forms of ordered space were reshaped by the project of unification and how, at the same time, that unification was constrained and limited by the necessary survival of the units on which it was based. Consequently, as Mark Edward Lewis shows, each level of spatial organization could achieve order and meaning only within an encompassing, superior whole: the body within the household, the household within the lineage and state, the city within the region, and the region within the world empire, while each level still contained within itself the smaller units from which it was formed. The unity that was the empire's highest goal avoided collapse back into the original chaos of nondistinction only by preserving within itself the very divisions on the basis of family or region that it claimed to transcend.

This book addresses why China is going into space and provides up- to-date information on all aspects of the Chinese Space Program in terms of launch vehicles, launch sites and infrastructure, crew vehicles for space exploration, satellite applications and scientific exploration capabilities. Beyond mere capabilities, it is important to understand how Chinese aerospace leaders think, how they make decisions, and what their ultimate goal is during their space endeavors. What are Chinese intentions in space? To what extent does culture and ethics influence Chinese strategic decision-making within the highest levels of the aerospace industrial complex? This book examines these questions and offers four potential scenarios on where the Chinese space program is headed based on this new perspective of understanding China’s space goals. This book is not only required reading for policy makers and military leaders in the US government, but also for the general population, students, and professionals interested in truly understanding the reasons behind what the Chinese are doing in space.