An "absolute requirement" in Xi Jinping's quest for Chinese Communist Party (CCP) world supremacy is the military conquest of Taiwan, an analyst noted.
But that strategy extends far beyond planet Earth, he emphasized.
"Controlling Taiwan will allow the CCP to dominate the First Island Chain and to better neutralize the Philippines, decreasing the threat to the most important People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Strategic Support Force (SSF) space base, the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Hainan Island," Richard Fisher wrote for the Taipei Times on Sept. 25.
Wenchang "will be key for China’s PLA-controlled space program achieving the CCP’s hegemonic ambitions on the Moon and beyond," noted Fisher, a contributing editor for Geostrategy-Direct.com and senior fellow with the International Assessment and Strategy Center.
Space will also be a key in China's plans to conquer Taiwan as the SSF "will be conducting battles in Low Earth Orbit (LEO, 80 to 2,000 kilometers) and higher Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO, 35,000 km)," Fisher wrote.
Related: Dictatorships on the rise in China’s Moon coalition, September 19, 2023
The SSF will deploy ground-based mobile lasers, ground-based anti-satellite interceptor missiles, satellite combat platforms, and possibly China’s Tiangong manned space station to attack U.S., Japanese, and Taiwanese optical surveillance, radar surveillance, and communication satellites in LEO, and U.S. early warning and navigation satellites in GEO.
As for "control of GEO and higher orbits that extend into Cislunar Space, the area between the Earth and the Moon," Fisher wrote that would require the PLA to "gain a dominant position on the Moon."
Officials in China's space program have said the communist nation's Long March-10 (LM-10) space launch vehicle could begin testing in 2026 and be ready for a manned mission to the Moon by 2029.
The space launch vehicle will have two LM-10s with one carrying a new-design manned capsule that will take China to the Moon and back and the other being used to loft a manned Moon Lander that will dock in lunar orbit with the capsule for crew transfer, and then detach and descend to the Moon.
"What Chinese officials fail to comment upon is that in copying the old Soviet-era Lunniy Korabyl (Lunar Craft, LK) design, the Chinese Moon Lander utilizes a large separate booster that performs most of the descent burn and then detaches to crash into the Moon," Fisher noted.
What will communist China do with Moon control?
In the September 2022 issue of the Chinese Journal of Deep Space Engineering, an article titled “Status and Prospects of Lunar-based Earth Observation Research,” suggests the placement of large radar on the Moon to monitor the Earth, Cislunar Space, and the Lagrangian Points, areas of equal gravitational pull around the Moon and Earth that are preferable to dominate as it is easier to station militarily useful satellites and bases in these areas.
The CCP also expects to generate great wealth from future Moon programs. In 2018 Bao Weimin of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) proposed an “Earth Moon space economic zone” that by 2050 could be generating US$10 trillion.
At a forum in Beijing last month, CASC expert Dr. Wang Wei said that, since about 2019, CASC had been developing a 100-year program that would see Chinese settlements on Mars, asteroids, on other planetary bodies, and utilizing Lagrangian Points, to establish bases for water-ice to oxygen and fuel production that could span the solar system.
An article in China Space News quotes Dr. Wang as saying, “Just like the miracles created in the Age of Great Navigation, the ‘great space age’ with the development of space resources will create the next miracle in the history of human development and bring new prosperity to human civilization.”
Fisher noted: "But just ponder this: the CCP’s 'next miracle in the history of human development' will be led by a regime that at a minimum has murdered 10 times as many people as did Adolf Hitler."
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