Under the headline, “Historic Meeting in Tiangong Belongs to China and the World,” the semi-official Global Times dedicated its editorial today to the historic achievement yesterday of two groups of taikonauts, three in each group, embracing and “successfully joining forces” at the Chinese space station, Tiangong, in a moment of great emotion. The achievement, the daily proudly reported, “shows China has become a veritable space power in the world.”
China has overcome great obstacles over the past decades, GT notes, developing from a nation in the early 1960s, which Mao Zedong described as not even able to “send a single potato into space,” to become a space power today which has reached its goal through “taking the road of self-reliance and arduous innovation in the aerospace field.”
China sees outer space as “the common domain of all humankind, and space exploration is the common cause of human beings,” Global Times explains, and in the future, there will not only be Chinese faces on Tiangong, but also faces of astronauts and scientists from all over the world. “Tiangong, as the `station in space,’ belongs to both China as well as the entire human race.”
GT contrasts China’s approach to space exploration to NASA’s self-defeating prohibition on any cooperation with China in space through the Wolf Amendment, as well as other restrictions and warnings that China poses “increasing `threats’ in the military space race.” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson had said he supported making the racist Wolf Amendment permanent, and that China not be allowed to participate in the research projects of the International Space Station.
