Leo Lewis.
After decades of industrial theft, China is desperate to be seen as a great innovator, says Did you really make that Moon rover by yourself?
FOR nearly a month the Jade Rabbit rover has been on a high-profile tour of the Moon, carrying the Chinese flag.
The achievement is impressive but in labs and space centres around the world, the burning (but discreet) question is: How much of Jade Rabbit and the rocket that put it on the Moon is stolen property?
The guest list for a grand party hosted by President Xi Jinping this week indicates how China’s leadership cherishes Jade Rabbit.
Its domestic propaganda value is especially important to Mr Xi’s year-old administration.
Premier Li Keqiang was there with all the top echelon of the Communist Party and a generous helping of military top brass.
Their guests were the lab coats, engineers and senior staff of China’s space programme. Yet to those watching around the world, it was a room that, even if not full of actual thieves and spies, celebrated a feat that owed much to both. Mr Xi described the Chang’e3 mission as ‘‘made in China in every sense of the phrase’’.
The whole project, he added, was ‘‘the result of independent innovation’’. This ignores the role of the European Space Agency in supplying control systems for Jade Rabbit. The rover’s shape closely resembles the US Opportunity rover and Chinese scientists have said the vehicle ‘‘borrowed heavily from other countries’’.
Even if the ‘‘made in China’’ claim were broadly true, it still raises the question why (as the US Government has avowed) China has conducted a decades-long espionage campaign to harvest America’s rocket, nuclear weapons and space programmes of as much technological knowhow as it can.
The red flags were raised some time ago. In 1999, the Cox Report to the US Congress provided an account of Chinese attempts to steal missile and space technology.
It condemned the US’s failure to prevent the theft but did little to stop it. The years since have produced a litany of China-related prosecutions for technology theft and violation of export controls, much of it related to space technology, but extending farther.
This week prosecutors in California opened a trial that promises to expose a decades-long multimillion-dollar industrial espionage campaign to steal the secrets of producing white pigment from Dupont. As one former US space engineer put it: ‘‘If China is such a great innovator, why is its hunger for US innovation still so frighteningly big?’’
Mr Xi’s phrasing had a whiff of desperation. So why such a compulsion to claim China did everything alone? The answer is that the years of economic boom mean China now inhabits a different place in the ecosystem.
In the past, stealing US space secrets may have felt clever and daring. Now, it is an admission of terrible weakness.
Meanwhile, a growing school of thought argues China is on course for calamity. It has sacrificed financial sense for roaring growth and has the sort of off-balancesheet debts that might chill markets around the world if they were not so well concealed.
As successive administrations dawdle over structural reform, the risks grow. It is probably not possible to deliver both growth and reform, so Mr Xi’s administration has to choose.
And if he does push forward with painful reform, he must convince himself and the public that China has something else up its sleeve to promote growth. One key to the future is innovation – not the appearance of it thanks to subterfuge, but the real thing.
A space programme is at the extreme of the innovation spectrum. The guests at Xi’s party know exactly how innovative China is. If the Made in China claim is not genuine, Beijing could be in trouble.