BEIJING (AP) – Cui Tingting dyed her hair red on Mars for the arrival of China’s spacecraft on the planet known in Chinese as the Fire Star.
“This is a great age for space, and the future of humanity lies in the exploration of outer space,” said Cui, director of the China Mars Society, the local chapter of a global advocacy network. It hosted an online party on Wednesday night to await the announcement that the Tianwen-1 spacecraft, launched in July last year, has reached Mars orbit.
Videos of participants from all over China showed a replica of the Tianwen-1 rover robot in the house of a member of the company. One was wearing a house space suit; another controlled his robot dog.
“Earth is our mother planet … but for me, Mars is the same,” Cui said.
China is falling in love with space, inspired by the Communist Party’s increasingly ambitious plans in the last two decades to launch people into orbit and explore the Moon and Mars.
Tourists head to the tropical island of Hainan to watch the rockets explode. Others visit mocking Mars colonies in desert places with white domes, airblocks, and space suits. The number of space-themed TV shows, books and fan clubs is on the rise.
The most popular space-themed account in the Sina Weibo microblogging service, similar to Twitter, “Our Space”, has 1.25 million followers.
The expanding space program coincides with President Xi Jinping’s campaign to promote an image of China that returns to its world-leading glory.
“It’s a symbol of power for China,” said Chen Qiufan, a science fiction author in Guangdong whose books include “Waste Tide.”
Xi’s government is trying to fuel public enthusiasm through a five-year scientific literacy action plan. It includes a promise of support for the development of Chinese science fiction.
In November, the Beijing government announced plans to build a scientific-industrial cluster zone to attract talent and create “original influential science fiction.”
“You have to take advantage of the power of movies, films and science fiction to spread propaganda and this idea: we have to go there,” Chen said, comparing it to the Renaissance.
This love affair also catches on in Japan, India and other countries that send probes through the solar system, joining a club of explorers long dominated by Washington and Moscow.
The race to explore Mars is so crowded that Tianwen-1 is not even the only spacecraft to arrive on the planet this week.
On Tuesday, Amal, a spacecraft launched by the United Arab Emirates, entered orbit.
In the Emirates’ largest city, Dubai, the government projected images of the two months of Mars into the sky. The Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai shone red at night. Signs depicting Amal, an Arab for hope, rise over Dubai’s highways.
In India, one of the country’s biggest movie stars, Akshay Kumar, led a blockbuster in 2019, “Mission Mangal”, inspired by the country’s first mission to Mars.
A new collection of short stories written in half a dozen languages called “The Best of World SF” captures this global wonder, said the book’s editor, Lavie Tidhar.
In American and British science fiction, Mars often plays the pure utopia of the decrepit dystopia of the Earth, but nowhere else, said Tidhar, who was raised on a kibbutz, a collectivist commune in Israel. In his novels “Martian Sands” and “Central Station”, the reborn Soviet Union, China and Israel flourish in the gloomy landscape of Mars.
“It’s boring, it’s hot, it’s crowded. It’s like growing up in a kibbutz – except you can never leave, ”he said.
China’s first science fiction book, “The City of Cats,” in 1933, was set on Mars.
The genre died out during the ultra-radical cultural revolution of 1966-76, when the US-Soviet space race inspired film studios to launch “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Solaris”.
China has embraced other imaginary worlds with the explosive success of Liu Cixin’s “Problem of the Three Bodies”, first published as a magazine series from 2006 to 2010. In 2015, Liu became the first Chinese author to receive the Hugo Award for Science the greatest honor of fiction.
A Hollywood-style blockbuster, “The Wandering Earth,” based on a novel by Liu, grossed over $ 700 million worldwide in 2019.
China became the third nation to launch a single-orbit astronaut in 2003, four decades after the former Soviet Union and the United States.
Its first temporary orbiting laboratory was launched in 2011 and a second in 2016. Plans provide for a permanent space station after 2022.
Space officials have expressed hope for a monthly equipped mission this year, but said it depends on budget and technology. They pushed that target back until at least 2024.
Science fiction writers are already imagining Chinese colonies on Mars.
Hao Jingfang’s novel “Vagabonds”, published last year, is situated between a Martian society devoid of poverty, but austere and a poor, crowded and polluted Earth. Hao became the first woman in China to receive the Hugo Award in 2016.
Luo Lingzuo’s 2019 “Land without Borders” imagines Chinese scientists genetically modifying potatoes to grow in Martian amber soil. “Orphans of the Red Planet”, physicist Liu Yang, about high school students on Mars fighting hostile aliens, is transformed into a TV series.
“We have to go into space,” said Chen, a Guangdong science fiction author. “Then we have the power equivalent to that of the United States and we can become the giant.”
Cui, of the Mars Society, is already planning another party in May, when Tianwen-1’s landing robot is about to be touched.
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Associated Press researchers Caroline Chen in Beijing and Chen Si in Shanghai, and writers Isabel DeBre in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates and Krutika Pathi in New Delhi contributed to the report.