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| And only 35 years late! | |
The chests of China's communist leaders swelled with pride today as China
joined the space race by blasting one of their own into orbit for the first
time. Clearly they regard their first launching of a manned vehicle, 'Chenzau'
into space as a giant propaganda coup - a feat after all which many more
'advanced nations' have not achieved. Presumably no-one told the Chinese that the space race is over. The winner may
be still in dispute, but they are doing this some 34 years after the US (a
country with less than a quarter of their population) landed a man on the moon.
Most Chinese may still live in poverty and squalor (the cost of having a
government who can only stay in power by keeping them ignorant), but having 1.3
billion Chinese to steal from made raising the money just that little bit
easier. Even more embarrassing for every self-respecting Chinese is the fact that it is
not even their own technology doing it. Their communist sister country, Russia,
sold them the technology in a bargain basement post-communist bankruptcy
fire-sale. The Chinese have done a great job of painting out the Russian
markings on the side and replacing with their own. Clearly the Chinese didn't put two and two together. The only reason the
Russians put the technology up for sale is because they lost the cold-war
against the running imperialist American dogs. Why do the Chinese think that
buying the same technology decades later will help them do so? The answer is that this is for internal consumption. The voices of dissent will
be quietened just that little bit by force-feeding the collectivist instincts
of the population. The Chinese did the same thing with the atomic bomb - a whole
generation of Chinese proudly boasted about developing atomic technology. A
strange thing to do considering it was just done by copying the Americans. Now,
in the 21st century it's space travel. So all of China is holding its collective breath to see if their first
'taikonaut' survives the vacuum of space. And the rest of the world thinks it's
much ado about nothing.
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