The US defence secretary during President Donald Trump’s first term, Jim Mattis, repeatedly warned that China would revert to a Ming dynasty-style model, projecting its strong military, technological and economic influence globally.
At the time, his views were widely questioned by mainstream academics as too aggressive. A decade ago, China still lagged far behind the United States.
But Mattis underestimated China’s ambitions.
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On January 29, China announced the official launch of a national space resources development programme, an ambitious project spanning nearly a century.
According to the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the plan is to build a vast interplanetary fleet to extend resource exploration and mining operations to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury and Venus.
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The project is named after the encyclopaedic work Tiangong Kaiwu (“The Exploitation of the Works of Nature”), published in 1637.
