Chapter 170: Space Race 7
Volume 6: Rising and Falling · Chapter 170
China's Chang'e 3 satellite, launched on November 11, 1965, landed on the moon and released a lunar rover. The rover conducted a lunar walk and exchanged photos with Chang'e 3. After these images and videos were broadcast on television, every ordinary person in the industrial nations on Earth believed that China fully possessed the capability to land on the moon. It was merely a question of whether the Chinese wanted to land or not; there were no technical obstacles to a moon landing.
Due to the clever application of technological superiority and psychological tactics, China made the people of the world believe it had the capability to land on the moon before actually achieving a manned landing. This space launch pushed the space race on Earth into a white-hot stage.
The US and the Soviet Union were no longer launching moon landing programs to show off their technology; they now had to prove they had the capability to land. This proof had to be more convincing than the Chinese one.
Meanwhile, in China, the 85-year-old Chen Ke used the already popularized television and computer network technologies to launch the Cultural Revolution. China turned its attention inward and cleanly withdrew from the space race.
It was not until 1981 that China carried out a manned moon landing. By then, 12 years had passed since the United States' self-proclaimed and highly controversial 1969 moon landing. China's landing was still a fully live-broadcast event, and also humanity's first fully live-broadcast landing on another planet.
Chen Ke had already passed away by this time. A lock of hair from this initiator of the Chinese space program was placed in a crystal box and deeply buried under the lunar surface in front of billions of viewers worldwide. Facing the audience, the Chinese astronaut said with a voice full of passion: "From now on, this is also another holy tomb in our hearts!"
Cold War historians evaluated this as follows:
Undoubtedly, the space race of the first phase of the Cold War was finally brought to a close by the Chinese landing on the moon in 1981. In a comprehensive evaluation, even if China was not the first to land on the moon, the winner was undoubtedly the Chinese. They convinced the world that China simply believed the time for a moon landing was not ripe, so they were unwilling to waste meaningless resources.
And the Information Age that China started in 1961, along with the Global Positioning System, allowed China to project its influence omni-directionally to the regions it controlled through satellites, television, and radio broadcasts starting in the 1960s.
Whether or not people were sent to the moon immediately meant little to those under Chinese influence. In the days that followed, through television, through radio, through telephone systems built on massive switching units, through wireless paging popularized starting in 1968, and the subsequent rapid development of computer networks and mobile communication systems, China relied on its accumulated technological power to incorporate vast territories into its own economic sphere.
The Information Age pioneered by Chen Ke effectively disseminated his ideas to the whole world. In the new Information Age, China created a method that could operate society more flatly, and dedicated itself to compressing social hierarchies, shortening the distance between policy makers, policy implementers, and those forced to accept them. And it used a more advanced system to operate this new era well.
When many people suddenly discovered that in the Information Age, more people were suddenly hearing their voices, what everyone felt was not joy, but panic. At this time, the one who told people the true face of this world was Chen Ke.
Many creatures will treat the first tall figure they see after opening their eyes as their leader; the China led by Chen Ke played such a role.
In this struggle, Chen Ke undoubtedly had the last laugh.
In the year of China's 1981 moon landing, the Soviet Union also conducted the "West-81" grand exercise. A torrent of steel composed of tens of thousands of tanks could easily conquer the whole of Western Europe. This exercise caused extreme panic in NATO.
The United States and Western Europe had to face unprecedented military pressure from the Soviet Union on one side, and unprecedented institutional pressure from China on the other. The United States could only choose to respond with everything it had. They launched the "Star Wars" program. They attempted to prove NATO's power in technology and military affairs.
The Cold War henceforth entered its final climax...
(End)