Lhe China launched the first component of its future space station on April 29. Despite the uncontrolled fallout of part of the launcher, this new success in a state-of-the-art sector, after the insertion of a module in Martian orbit in February and the recovery of lunar samples in December 2020, should put an end to recurring discourse on a supposed cultural or political inability of China to innovate.
However, behind official speeches, space success is not such a reassuring factor for the Chinese authorities because it remains an exception. Progress is much more uncertain in other high-tech industrial fields, as illustrated by the space-related one of aeronautics. While China first reached the far side of the moon in January 2019, it is struggling to certify its first airliner, supposed to compete with those of Airbus and Boeing, four years after its first flight in May 2017.
There is a historical reason for this situation. Fifty years later, China is still paying the price for the Cultural Revolution. The space exception is that the technologies of military nuclear power and ballistics – that of missiles and, by derivation, rockets – were the only areas preserved from the systematic destruction of knowledge which swept China between 1966 and 1976. Dongfanghong , the first Chinese satellite, was launched by a Long March 1 – the first in a series of rockets since available in 22 variants – in 1970, at the height of the atrocities of the Red Guards.
The success of new industries
The other sectors of Chinese industry have not been so lucky. The knowledge patiently acquired and the programs set in motion by pioneers dedicated to the pillory as servants of knowledge “Bourgeois” and “Anti-revolutionary” were squandered and arrested, and the country plunged into ten years of glaciation of its educational system and scientific research.
Half a century later, Chinese industry still bears the scars of this disaster. Certain sectors have certainly caught up in a spectacular fashion; but it is with the decisive contribution of foreign technologies.
If only twenty-two years separate the last Datong steam locomotives produced in 1988 from the first nationally designed high-speed trainsets in 2010, it is because the competition between German, Japanese and Canadian players to conquer the Chinese market has led to difficulties. massive technology transfers. If the Hualong-1 reactor, which entered service in 2020, symbolizes the civilian nuclear capacity of today’s China, it is the result of French, American and Russian cooperation accumulated since the end of the 1970s.
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