Cui Tingting (崔婷婷) dyed her hair Mars red for the arrival of China’s spacecraft at the planet known in Chinese as the Fire Star (火星).
“This is a great era for space, and the future of mankind lies in the exploration of outer space,” said Cui, director of the China Mars Society, the local chapter of a global advocacy network.
She hosted an online party on Wednesday night to wait for the announcement that the Tianwen-1 spacecraft, launched in July last year, had reached Mars orbit.
Photo: AP
Video from participants across China showed a replica of Tianwen-1’s robot rover in the home of one society member. One wore a homemade space suit; another controlled his robot dog.
“Earth is our mother planet ... but for me, Mars is the same,” Cui said.
China is falling in love with space, inspired by the ruling party’s increasingly ambitious plans over the past two decades to launch humans into orbit and explore the moon and Mars.
Tourists flock to tropical Hainan island to watch rockets blast off. Others visit mock Mars colonies in desert sites with white domes, airlocks and spacesuits. The number of space-themed TV shows, books and fan clubs is growing.
The most popular space-themed account on the Sina Weibo microblog service, “Our Space,” has 1.25 million followers.
The expanding space program coincides with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) campaign to promote an image of China returning to its former glory as a world leader.
“It’s a symbol of power for China,” said Chen Qiufan (陳秋凡), a science fiction author in Guangdong whose books include Waste Tide (廢潮).
Xi’s government is trying to nurture public enthusiasm with a five-year Scientific Literacy Action Plan. It includes a promise of support for developing Chinese science fiction.
In November, the city government of Beijing announced plans to build a science fiction industry cluster area to attract talent and create “influential original science-fiction works.”
“You have to leverage the power of films, movies and science fiction to broadcast propaganda and this idea: We need to go there,” said Chen, comparing it to the Renaissance.
That love affair also is catching on in Japan, India and other countries that are sending probes across the solar system, joining a club of explorers long dominated by Washington and Moscow.
The race to explore Mars is so crowded that Tianwen-1 is not even the only spacecraft to arrive at the planet this week.
On Tuesday, Amal, a spacecraft launched by the United Arab Emirates, swung into orbit.
In the Emirates’ biggest city, Dubai, the government projected images of Mars’ two moons into the sky. Dubai’s Burj Khalifa skyscraper glowed red at night. Billboards depicting Amal, Arabic for hope, tower over Dubai’s highways.
In India, one of the country’s biggest film stars, Akshay Kumar, led a 2019 blockbuster, Mission Mangal, inspired by the country’s first mission to Mars.
A new collection of short stories written in a half-dozen languages called The Best of World SF captures this global wonder, said the book’s editor, Lavie Tidhar.
In American and British sci-fi, Mars often plays the pristine utopia to Earth’s decrepit dystopia, but not so elsewhere, said Tidhar, who was raised on a kibbutz, a collectivist commune in Israel.
In his novels Martian Sands and Central Station, a reborn Soviet Union, China and Israel flourish on the bleak landscape of Mars.
“It’s boring, it’s hot, it’s cramped. 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 set on Mars.
The genre died out during the ultra-radical 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, when the US-Soviet space race inspired film studios to release 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris.
China re-embraced imaginary other worlds with the explosive success of The Three-Body Problem (三體) by Liu Cixin (劉慈欣), first published as a magazine serial from 2006 to 2010. In 2015, Liu became the first Chinese author to receive the Hugo Award, science fiction’s highest honor.
A Hollywood-style blockbuster, The Wandering Earth (流浪地球), based on a novella by Liu, grossed more than US$700 million worldwide in 2019.
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