A Historical Review of U.S.-China Relations in the Space Domain

Abstract

The relationship between the United States and China, with all its complexity and global consequence, is one that should be approached with clear-sighted, judicious care. This is particularly the case in the space domain. Hence, a historical overview of U.S.-China relations in this domain can both remind us of the interconnectedness between the two nations' efforts and emphasize the context from which many of their current actions and aspirations stem. Throughout this history, there has been an oscillation between suspicion and a desire for reconciliation. Even from the beginning of the relationship, key moments point to decisions made by the United States having effects that were counterproductive to their original intent and desires. The birth of the Chinese space program, a period of growing pains, and its current accelerating maturity have all been attended by the United States in some fashion and shaped in ways by U.S. policy decisions. Five generalized periods of interface for the United States and China can illustrate the nature of their space relationship: a foundational period, an adolescent trial run, the turn to a restrictive millennium, further dividing regulations, and the most recent hardening of separation.

INTRODUCTION

This article provides an intermediate overview and analysis of the history of United States and Chinese interactions in space. The central theme observed throughout is a fluctuation between periods of suspicion and subsequent endeavors for reconciliation. Notably, key moments in the relationship highlight instances where U.S. decisions yielded unintended and counterproductive outcomes contrary to their original objectives.

The inception of the Chinese space program, a phase marked by challenges and growth, and its current trajectory of accelerated maturity have all been influenced to varying degrees by the United States and shaped by corresponding policy decisions. By examining five distinct periods of interaction between the United States and China, namely (1) a foundational period, (2) an adolescent trial run at cooperation, (3) a shift toward a more restrictive millennium, (4) an implementation of further dividing regulations, and (5) the recent intensification of separation, a comprehensive understanding of their space relationship can be elucidated.

FOUNDATIONAL ERA

The foundational period of Sino-American space relations features the remarkable journey of Dr. Qian Xuesen (also known as Hsue-Shen Tsien), a Chinese aerospace engineer and scientist. Initially studying in the United States on a scholarship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was later recruited by Theodore von Karman for advanced studies at the California Institute of Technology. Qian contributed to both Operation Paperclip, which facilitated the arrival of Wernher von Braun in the United States, as well as to the Manhattan Project.

However, due in part to government intelligence fears and xenophobic sentiments prevailing at that time during the second Red Scare, he became characterized as a Communist. This was on spurious grounds according to a number of contemporaries of his and prominent historians since. ¹ Subsequently, he was put on house arrest from 1950 to 1955 before being deported to China. In his home country, he earned the title “father of Chinese rocketry” as he played a crucial role in the development of the Chinese Dongfeng ballistic missile and the early formulation of their space program.

Former U.S. Secretary of the Navy, Dan A. Kimball, aptly expressed regret, stating that the deportation of Qian “was the stupidest thing this country ever did. He was no more a Communist than I was, and we forced him to go.” ²

China, as largely a developing country during the following decades, had its consternations of politics and culture. Moreover, there was an ideological divergence with the Soviet Union from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. This was attributed to the perceived unsuitably revisionist and Western-leaning approach to implementing Communism in Moscow under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev and then Leonid Brezhnev, as viewed by Maoist China.

This rift was despite having received much of China's early rocket technology and training from Sino-Russo exchanges. ³ Significantly impacting technological advancement and human capital development, the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, orchestrated under Mao's leadership, had a profound effect on China. It led to the suppression, persecution, and loss of numerous talented scientists and engineers, resulting in the disruption and diminishment of a generation of intellectual potential. ⁴

While a large portion of the United Nations member states and other advanced countries gathered to ratify the Outer Space Treaty (OST) and its subsequent three treaties (The Rescue Agreement, Space Liability Convention, and Registration Convention) from 1967 to 1976, Chinese space efforts were largely focused on launching their first satellite (the Dong Fang Hong I, or “The East Is Red”) and trying to build out a missile program. China did end up signing the OST in 1983, the same year that Sally Ride launched into orbit aboard Space Shuttle mission seven as the first U.S. woman in space.

ADOLESCENT ERA

The next notable interface between the United States and China's capabilities was in the 1990s. The Challenger Space Shuttle disaster had made the Americans more disinclined to launch humans domestically all while more amenable to launching cargo abroad. ⁵ Meanwhile, the Chinese had developed their launch capacity and could provide cost-effective services to international customers, including the Americans. As documented in prior work on the topic, “the attractive numbers and lenient trends for license acquisition to launch abroad meant American companies like Space Systems/Loral (SSL) lobbied Congress with success to partner on a series of Chinese rocket launches to send up Intelsat satellites in the mid-1990s.” ⁶

Despite the mediocre development and testing record of the Chinese National Space Administration's (CNSA) Long March rockets at the time, SSL was preemptively given the go-ahead by the State Department to proceed with their launch. ⁷ “Over two subsequent winters in 1995 and 1996, a pair of disastrous Sino-American joint launches from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwestern China ended with civilian casualties when the rockets careened off course into nearby villages.” ⁶

A multinational team at the behest of international insurers investigated the mishaps. Their reporting identified a different problem as the culprit than the initial official Chinese government statements. The American companies shared this more accurate insight with their Chinese partners on the launches, thinking it was the proper protocol.

These launch accidents, the Apstar-2 and Intelsat-708, brought further suspicion on China in the eyes of the U.S. Congress. There was already worry about Chinese espionage around nuclear technology at the time. And it was easy to presume a connective overlap to the launch accidents as there were key pieces of debris from the explosions that were conspicuously missing regarding satellite encryption and guidance mechanisms.

An official U.S. Government Review Committee felt that the incidents provided material benefit to China's ballistic missile program and guidance systems. ⁸ In regulatory terms, what came of these tragic mishaps was tighter export controls from the United States. These essentially moved most satellite and space technologies onto the highly restricted U.S. Munitions List (USML) under the Department of State's International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).

The move was meant to stop all tech transfer from the United States to Chinese space operations, which were primarily military at the time. It was codified in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 1999 and continued until 2013.

OSCILLATING THINKING

This about-face, around the year 2000, and the deliberate fencing off of the Chinese program inadvertently impaired the American industrial base and European customers as well. ⁹ Technologies classified under the ITAR became highly restricted, even down to minute components. They provided a regulatory hurdle that prior European partners concluded was too cost intensive. Due in part to this, the domestic satellite industry in America waned in the years after 2000, and European counterparts developed their own solutions or became more inclined to engage Chinese or other options. ¹⁰

This meant that if the Chinese were looking to absorb and reverse-engineer foreign technologies, being cut off from the United States outright did little to stop their access to predating similar technologies already accessible through their European partners. The Chinese program, particularly the military component of systems buildouts, may have been slowed by the ITAR constrictions.

Still, ultimately their progress overall toward space endeavors was persistent and did not necessitate access to U.S. innovations. America's prohibitive export control regime, thus, did little in the long run to thwart Chinese progress while spurning legacy partners away from the American satellite industry.

Chinese human spaceflight efforts came to fruition in October 2003 when Yang Liwei became China's first person in space. Some analysts have suggested that technological parity is a key factor in the willingness of states otherwise at odds to feel compelled to reach out to one another. ¹¹ As evidence, one can take the salvos of congratulations from the Soviets to the United States after successful endeavors of catching up in the initial 1960s space race or point to the similarly timed first meetings between the Americans and CNSA officials shortly after Yang's breakthrough launch.

Furthermore, during U.S. President George W. Bush's tenure, there were hallmark moments of potential rapprochement and starting anew. The head of CNSA visited the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) facilities for the first time around 2004. And in 2005, NASA officials jointly and publicly presented China's space plans at the National Space Symposium, what is now largely considered an American military-adjacent space convening.

When the second crewed Chinese mission was preparing to launch that same year, the United States shared debris tracking data to ensure the safety of China's mission operations. And shortly after the mission, for the first time, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin traveled to China to see Chinese counterpart space facilities. His experience was dispiriting, lamenting the cold welcome and cagey willingness of officials there, largely composed of military personnel from the People's Liberation Army (PLA), to show him much of anything.

A tonal change occurred in the relationship when in 2007, China tested an anti-satellite weapon (ASAT) to the condemnation of the global community. It was their third test (of 10 total) and the most destructive in the history of global space activity creating ∼3,400 pieces of debris, more than 2,700 of which are still in orbit by some estimates and will be for more than a century. ¹²

The target was one of their own weather satellites. But this event compounded on top of U.S. intelligence evidence from a few months prior that the Chinese had “dazzled” or illuminated an American satellite as a test. ¹³ These events combined may have helped begin the pivot from those brief auspicious years of bilateral space relations.

The next year, America conducted its own ASAT test. While it was its 33rd overall, it was the United States' only test in over two decades (all 173 debris pieces have deorbited). Whether conducted as a countermessage or not, the Chinese and Russians likely took it as such, jointly submitting to the Conference on Disarmament a draft prohibition on deploying weapons in space.

Nothing was to come of this at the time, but the diplomatic move was deliberate and similar efforts resurfaced again in 2014. ¹⁴ This contentious sequence illustrated a readiness on all sides to characterize the others' governance proposals as disingenuous and behavior as hypocritical.

President Obama, who had taken office shortly after, wanted a cooperative front in the space domain with all actors, at first preferring the tools of export control reform over wrangling with grand treaties. Thus, one front for a potentially cooperative future remained in Congress. Perspectives on export controls had been shifting after significant private sector blowback, and a Congressional report was commissioned in 2010 (what became the 1248 Report) to assess the risks of delisting space technologies.

Hope held out in the executive branch, and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, a retired astronaut and pilot, was sent to China by President Obama. He was to meet with Chinese space officials again and try to progress dialogue. Unfortunately, much like his predecessor, Michael Griffin, Bolden returned from the trip without meaningful cooperative assurances from the Chinese. ¹⁵

FURTHER DIVISION

In 2011, the United States switched its rhetoric. President Obama declared a “second Sputnik” moment as China was gaining a lead on the United States in energy, computing, and artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, Congressional fulmination on perceived Chinese intellectual property theft and human rights violations came to a head. U.S. Congressman from Virginia, Frank Wolf, who supposedly had his personal computer compromised by the Chinese, submitted amending legislation to further restrict interactions with China from the U.S. government, including executive branch efforts like Bolden's trip.

In that year's NDAA, language was included that remains today, restricting NASA, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the National Space Council (NSpC) from working with CNSA or any Chinese government or private entities without express permission from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. If the strict ITAR separations from China had perpetuated a precarity for the United States of its own making, this language in the funding bill, known now as the Wolf Amendment, doubled down on bifurcating any Sino-American actions. Now even those in the government with less hawkish positions on China had their hands tied.

Xi Jinping came to power soon after in China and was wholly changing the course of China's global posture toward a more assertive and leadership-driven national apparatus on economic, defense, technological, and diplomatic fronts. Though cooperation with the United States at this point may have expedited some of the Chinese milestones in their space program, it is easy to argue that their self-sufficiency was already in effect and that the Wolf Amendment, on top of stringent ITAR guidelines, were expressions of American worry more so than roadblocks for the Chinese space enterprise. ¹⁶

What was genuinely effective for the United States during this time was corralling the political capital to push through export control reforms. Specifically, five space technologies including planetary rovers and more standard satellite components were delisted from the ITAR's USML classification onto the more lenient dual-use sections of the Commercial Control List under Export Administration Regulations at the Department of Commerce.

The American industry could more easily, and legally, transact with a portion of international customers again, traditional allies and partners included, while still excluding certain flagged strategic competitors. This was a hard-won process that illustrated to those in the U.S. government and industry where the regulatory lines needed to be nimble enough to serve American economic security as well as national defense primacy. Notably, more recent assessments of the correlation between those export controls and the purported economic downturn have now contrasted with the early findings leading up to delisting.^9,17

Still the dominant leader in space capabilities at the time, the United States kept a wary eye on Chinese military space developments. The presumption was that all space domain activity had some hint of PLA influence behind it, with the major state-owned enterprises serving the Chinese space program, and both China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation and China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation having exceptional military ties.

The Russians, in the summer of 2015, had resumed organization of their space-specific military forces (the Kosmicheskie voyska Rossii), and the Chinese stood up a similar contingent in the PLA that winter (the PLA Strategic Support Force). From China's theater, doctrine was expressed the following year that linked space goals to President Xi's larger conceptions, including the “Chinese Dream,” the “Made in China 2025” plans, and general national rejuvenation.

These ideas were expressed in the 2016 Chinese Space White Paper on space goals, sometimes referred to as their Space Perspective (the fourth at the time; 2000, 2006, 2011, 2016). In addition, the 13th Five-Year Plan (China's national guiding strategic document) came out that same year. International cooperation and commercialization were both highlighted priorities and particularly linked to the rollout of China's globe-spanning Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), but neither concept was stated as a pillar of national strategy at the time. ¹⁸

There were passing conciliatory events through this era. For instance, both sides met for the U.S.-China Civil Space Dialogue in 2015 out of concern that civil missions could be jeopardized if some critical information was not shared. This convening continued biannually for another 2 years. But any promise in those meetings belied the perception that “a broad and robust” array of space capabilities including ASAT weapons were still being developed, according to a U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report. ¹⁹

SEPARATION REINFORCED

This brings us to the last and current iteration of the space relationship between China and the United States, where the divorce of operations by the two leading space-faring nations is calcifying. While hopes of the commercial space industry in the United States were certainly boosted under the Obama Administration's 2015 Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, more overtly American-centric regulations came under the Trump administration.

Both economic and defense space communities were given support for paradigm-shifting activity during this time. There was the 2017 reinstatement of the NSpC, the 2019 formalization of the U.S. Space Force as the sixth military branch, and the culmination of America's long-awaited return to crewed launch capabilities on May 30, 2020. In addition, President Trump issued several Space Policy Directives. One was on a return to the Moon, which became the Artemis program.

Others streamlined commercial regulations across agencies, reviewed space traffic management, revamped cybersecurity principles, pushed for space nuclear propulsion technology development, and revisited a possible overhaul of the U.S. Global Positioning System in light of China's recent completion of their alternative BeiDou system.

The Artemis Accords were proposed as guidelines of cooperation for space-faring activities to the Moon, Mars, and celestial bodies beyond. Constructed as bilateral agreements between the United States and now 32 partner countries, the Accords have garnered conspicuous criticism, particularly from China and Russia. One Chinese aerospace commentator characterized them as further evidence of U.S. self-aggrandizement and a “modern Enclosure Movement” trying to stymie Chinese progress and standardize utilization of the Moon outside collective international organizations or diplomatic instruments and treaties. ²⁰

Concurrently during the Trump administration and into the Biden administration, the Chinese space program marched ahead according to plan, logging big achievements at precipitate speed. These include constructing half a dozen launch sites domestically, placing the first ever rover on the far side of the Moon, returning lunar regolith, completing most of their satellite constellations for remote sensing, communication, and navigation, commencing their first permanent crewed space station in low Earth orbit, landing a rover on Mars, creating a roadmap for an International Lunar Research Station, successfully testing some of the world's most advanced hypersonic missiles, and rolling out their Space Information Corridor (SIC). The SIC as the space component of China's BRI global overhaul, ostensibly folds participating developing nations into their technological systems, standards, and perhaps more indirectly, their world view of space and a Sino-centric future. ²¹

In 2019, when the world's largest space conference, the International Astronautical Congress, was held in Washington D.C., much of the Chinese delegation was noticeably absent. There are multiple perspectives on what transpired with this, but certainly it seems the divide persists between the space activities of the world's two most powerful economies.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in his speech regarding foreign policy guidance on March 3, 2021, alluded to the implications of where this joint history has led. The speech outlined how America's “biggest geopolitical test of the 21st century [is the] relationship with China. Several countries present [the U.S.] with serious challenges… But the challenge posed by China is different, with the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to seriously challenge the stable and open international system that serves the interests and reflects the values of the American people.” ²²

While he was speaking to the broader U.S.-China relationship across policy areas, space policy as a component of foreign relations and technological competition echoes many of those same elements with its symbolic and elevated place in the minds of both nations. The hope is that the stakes have not been raised to a level where one nation's progress means the complete diminution of the other, or the diminution of any of the other 193 countries on the planet that are free to explore space under the OST for that matter.