A July 12 photo taken by China's Zhurong Mars rover, showing at a distance the parachute and backshell that helped it land safely on the red planet. Photo: AFP PHOTO / CNSA
Centuries passed. History became legend. Legend became myth. A royal clan founded Chu in 1030 BCE and migrated south to the shores of the Yangtze, where the kingdom flourished. The kings of Chu traced their lineage to Zhurong, who was no longer a person or a title but a deity, the God of Fire. In one version of the tale, it was Zhurong who subdued the water spirit and taught his people how to use flame to prepare the land for planting. Burning cleared the ground. Ashes enriched the soil. The agricultural practice of the south, linked to the movements of rivers and stars through an origin story, carried cosmic significance.The agricultural practice of the south, linked to the movements of rivers and stars through an origin story, carried cosmic significance.
A painting depicting the poet Qu Yuan on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2012. Photo: STAN HONDA / AFP
Fang Lizhi in 1996. He published the first paper on modern cosmology in China and, in 2012, died in exile in the U.S. Photo: John B. Carnett/Bonnier Corp. via Getty Images
I had just started middle school when China launched its first robotic spacecraft in 1999, and was in high school when the first Chinese astronaut soared above the atmosphere. It was perhaps little more than adolescent rebellion that I found the glaring patriotism in the news reports alienating. What’s the point of lifting into space, if the mind lingered within the narrow confines of the party and the state? The universe still beckoned. I decided to study particle physics and arrived in the U.S. in 2009 for my Ph.D. Two years later, as China’s first prototype space station readied for operations, the U.S. Congress passed a law that prohibited NASA from using federal funds to collaborate with Chinese entities and restricted access to NASA facilities for Chinese nationals. A number of U.S. scientists boycotted a NASA conference in 2013, after their Chinese colleagues, including the ones working at U.S. institutions, were barred from participating. The conference was on the search for planets outside the solar system. Linking it with national security appeared ludicrous. Yet for the most powerful countries, space exploration is a tool of empire. The final frontier has always been a site of competition and conquest.What’s the point of lifting into space, if the mind lingered within the narrow confines of the party and the state?
Astronauts Tang Hongbo (left), Liu Boming (center), and Nie Haisheng wave before their launch mission on June 17, 2021. Photo: GREG BAKER / AFP
To me, the juxtaposition of vocations, from farmer to astronaut, contains a more profound truth: one’s relationship with the land determines one’s attitude toward space. Is land a possession, a prize, a place for extraction and exploitation? Or is it like a member of the family, cherished and nurturing, as humans and the earth share the same cosmic origins? In the project of empire, land is expendable. Value exists only in the present, measured by commodity pricing or military posture. As the scholar Kate Crawford writes, the practice of mining that undergirds the electronics industry, which prides itself on newness, extracts “Earth’s geological history to serve a split second of contemporary technological time.” It’s under the same prism of endless consumption and expansion that space is offered as the solution to a depleted Earth. On the timescale of humanity, Mars is a constant. It brims with the prospect of redemption, or, at the very least, the promise of an adventure. The rich and the powerful boast plans to transform the ecosystems of a distant, uninhabitable planet, but dismiss calls for more sustainable living and more just governance here as too idealistic. July 1 was the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. Zhurong beamed back a series of videos from Mars. In the words of the Chinese space agency, the rover was “reporting its safety to the party and the motherland.” Tang and his colleagues dispatched their greetings from the space station. “Happy birthday to the great Chinese Communist Party,” the trio said and saluted to the camera. Time is relative. In the life of a person, a century is an eternity. For a single-party state, the government of China has accomplished a record-breaking feat. Compared with empires and kingdoms of the past, the present regime is still young. The history of our species is barely a blip on the cosmic scale. Yet every atom carries memories of the grand inception. I look out the window and watch the last sunlight recede over the cityscape. The stretch of sky above has been a refuge during this time of solitude and uncertainty. Hidden behind the inky canvas are distant stars. In the thousands of years it took for their gleam to reach Earth, their presence also held my ancestors’ gaze. I picture the constellations coming alive. They tell stories about a people who lived by the river and ploughed with fire, who sang songs about the sky and how the cinder bears the seed.Yangyang Cheng is a postdoctoral fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center and a particle physicist.Is land a possession, a prize, a place for extraction and exploitation? Or is it like a member of the family, cherished and nurturing, as humans and the earth share the same cosmic origins?