BEIJING (AP) – Cui Tingting dyed his hair red Mars due to the arrival of the Chinese spacecraft on the planet known in Chinese as the Fire Star.
“This is a great time 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 defense network. . He hosted an online party Wednesday night to await the announcement that the Tianwen-1 spacecraft, launched last July, had reached Mars orbit.
Video of participants from all over China showed a replica of the Tianwen-1 robot rover at the home of a member of society. One wore a homemade space suit; another controlled his robot dog.
“Earth is our mother planet … but to me, Mars is the same,” Cui said.
China falls in love with space, inspired by the increasingly ambitious plans of the ruling Communist Party over the past two decades to launch humans into orbit and explore the Moon and Mars.
Tourists flock to the tropical island of Hainan to watch rockets explode. Others visit simulated colonies of Mars in desert places with white domes, air locks, and space suits. The number of space-themed TV shows, books and fan clubs is growing.
The most popular space-themed account on 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 former glory as a world leader.
“It’s a symbol of power for China,” said Chen Qiufan, author of science fiction in Guangdong, which includes among its books “Waste Tide”.
The Xi government is trying to encourage public enthusiasm with a five-year plan for scientific literacy action. It includes a pledge of support for the development of Chinese science fiction.
In November, the Beijing city government announced plans to build an area of clusters in the science fiction industry to attract talent and create “influential original science fiction works.”
“You have to harness the power of movies, films and science fiction to spread propaganda and that idea: you have to go for it,” Chen said, comparing it to the Renaissance.
This love story is also recovering in Japan, India and other countries that send probes into the solar system and join a long-time Washington-Moscow-dominated explorer club.
The race to explore Mars is so busy that Tianwen-1 is not even the only spacecraft to hit the planet this week.
On Tuesday, Amal, a spacecraft launched by the United Arab Emirates, spun into orbit.
In the Emirates ’largest city, Dubai, the government projected images of the two moons of Mars into the sky. Dubai’s Burj Khalifa skyscraper glowed red at night. Billboards depicting Amal, an Arab by hope, rise above the roads of Dubai.
In India, one of the country’s biggest movie stars, Akshay Kumar, led a 2019 blockbuster, “Mission Mangal,” inspired by the country’s first mission to Mars.
A new collection of stories written in half a dozen languages called “The Best of World SF” captures this world wonder, said the book’s editor, Lavie Tidhar.
In American and British science fiction, Mars usually plays the virgin utopia of the decopied Earth’s dystopia, but nowhere else, said Tidhar, who was raised in a kibbutz, a collectivist commune of Israel. In his novels “Martian Sands” and “Central Station,” the reborn Soviet Union, China, and Israel flourish in the desolate landscape of Mars.
“It’s boring, it’s hot, it’s narrow. It’s a bit like growing up in a kibbutz, except you can never leave, ”he said.
China’s first science fiction book, “City of Cats,” in 1933, was installed on Mars.
The genre became extinct during the ultra-radical Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, when the Soviet-American space race inspired film studios to launch “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Solaris”.
China once again embraced other imaginary worlds with the explosive success of Liu Cixin’s “The Three-Body Problem,” first published as a series magazine from 2006 to 2010. In 2015, Liu became the first Chinese author who received the Hugo Award, science the highest honor of fiction.
A Hollywood-style blockbuster, “The Wandering Earth,” based on a Liu novel, grossed more than $ 700 million worldwide in 2019.
China became the third nation to launch an astronaut into orbit on its own in 2003, four decades after the former Soviet Union and the United States.
Its first time orbit laboratory was launched in 2011 and a second in 2016. Plans envisage a permanent space station after 2022.
Space officials had expressed hope for a manned lunar mission as early as this year, but said it depended on budget and technology. They have pushed this target back to at least 2024.
Science fiction writers are already imagining Chinese colonies on Mars.
Hao Jingfang’s novel “Vagabonds,” published last year, lies between a poverty-free but austere Martian society and a poor, crowded, polluted Earth. Hao became the first Chinese author to receive the Hugo Award in 2016.
Luo Lingzuo’s 2019 “Land Without Borders” imagines Chinese scientists genetically altering potatoes to grow in rotten amber soil. Physicist Liu Yang’s “Red Planet Orphans,” about high school students on Mars fighting hostile aliens, is becoming a television series.
“We have to go to space,” said Chen, the science fiction author in Guangdong. “Then we have the power equivalent to what the United States has and then we can become the giant.”
Cui, of the Society of Mars, is already planning another party in May, when Tianwen-1’s Lander robot is due to play.
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Associated Press researchers Caroline Chen in Beijing and Chen Si in Shanghai and writers Isabel DeBre in Dubai, UAE and Krutika Pathi in New Delhi contributed to this report.