When I visited China several years ago, I met with an engineer from the Chinese Academy of Sciences to discuss the technological advances of the West. Calling the Chinese “the descendants of dragons,” he said “we have awakened.” In that moment, I saw China’s space program as not just a national project, but also a civilizational act of remembrance.
I was there teaching courses on statistical orbit determination at the Beijing Institute of Technology and at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Between lectures, my hosts took me to a rural village near Shanghai called Zhujiajiao, also referred to as the “Venice of Shanghai,” where houses were packed along waterways and incense drifted from small temples. One of my guides spoke candidly about the impact of the decades of extraction and colonialism by the West, chiefly the U.S., U.K. and Europe. He spoke too of what he perceived as hypocrisy by nations that once divided his homeland and now lecture it about ethics, such as military interventions and human rights standards.
China’s long history shapes its behavior in ways Americans often fail to grasp. For instance, the Chinese people remember historical humiliations: the ports forced open by British gunboats, the unequal treaties, the racial exclusion in Western lands. They remember the long arc of Chinese experience in America: the mid-19th-century labor migrations that brought men to blast tunnels through the Sierra Nevada for the Transcontinental Railroad, and the Page Act and Chinese Exclusion Act that barred their families and stripped them of any path to citizenship. Chinese communities were blamed for economic downturns in the 1870s and 1880s, targeted during the Rock Springs and Los Angeles massacres, quarantined during smallpox and plague outbreaks in San Francisco, and later treated with suspicion during the Red Scare. That history burns beneath Chinese policy choices.
What became obvious to me is that China’s global reach is about protection — of its people, culture and lineage. To watch Chinese rockets and spacecraft ascend into orbit today is to witness a culture performing self-repair in real time. The West calls it competition; Beijing calls it rejuvenation. In the mythic lexicon of Chinese identity, the dragon symbolizes harmony, intelligence and cosmic order. To awaken it is to restore equilibrium after chaos. For a civilization that still carries the scars of what’s dubbed the “Century of Humiliation” — the period from the mid-1800s Opium Wars through Japan’s wartime occupation — space is not simply the next frontier. It is the stage for redemption.
When Chinese engineers talk about reaching the moon or building a station in lunar orbit, it’s clear they’re thinking in terms of decades or even centuries. Yet government officials and policy experts in Washington often frame every milestone as a revival of the Cold War space race, a contest for strategic advantage, another chapter in the story of American preeminence under threat.
That framing flattens a far older story. China’s rise in space is propelled by two intertwined forces. Culturally, it springs from a five-millennia worldview that never severed the link between humanity and the sky, seeing order in heaven as inseparable from harmony on Earth. Politically, it channels the memory of subjugation into a project of national self-possession. President Xi Jinping has made this explicit by tying space exploration to what has been called “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” a vision built on transcending the Century of Humiliation.
Yet the moral geometry of restoration bends easily toward domination. The Belt and Road Initiative’s growing presence across the Global South is often described as cooperation, but it’s not kinship. China offers satellites and launch services to developing nations, but the prosperity often flows one way. In Kenya, Zambia, Peru and Sri Lanka, residents have protested land seizures, debt-heavy deals, unsafe mining conditions and ports leased for generations, arguing that these Chinese-backed projects echo older patterns in which outsiders extracted wealth while locals absorbed the harm. Even in China, the cost of this awakening is measured in poisoned rivers and smog-filled skylines. The country that once regarded harmony with nature as sacred has become one of the planet’s most prolific polluters.
What matters now is not which nation launches more rockets, but the values guiding those rockets once they leave the ground. China’s space program is shaped by a long memory, a desire for restoration, order and national coherence. America’s is shaped by frontier myth, commercial ingenuity and a belief that disruption itself is virtue. These orientations produce different architectures, different governance instincts and different definitions of responsibility.
In a world of shared orbits, these value systems do not remain abstract. A China that prizes central control will favor tightly managed constellations, state-centric navigation systems and a closed standard-setting process. A United States that elevates market dynamism will produce congested skies, proliferated satellites and norms shaped not by treaties but by quarterly earnings. One leans toward strategic stability, the other toward rapid iteration. Each creates a future that complicates the other.
The divergence becomes most consequential in crises — a collision in low-Earth orbit, a misinterpreted maneuver, a debris cascade. A governance framework built on central authority will interpret ambiguity through suspicion; one built on commercial freedom may fail to impose guardrails before it’s too late. Without a shared ethic, uncertainty becomes escalation. The danger is not that one system triumphs, but that both drift into a world where coordination is impossible.
This is why the story of values is the story of outcome. If we continue to treat space as a proving ground for old identities — China seeking rejuvenation, America chasing reinvention — we inherit orbits shaped by rivalry instead of reciprocity. But if either side can step beyond its reflexes, the future of space changes: Debris becomes a managed commons instead of a tragedy, constellations become infrastructure instead of hazard, and exploration becomes an act of stewardship rather than projection.
