BEIJING (AP) – Cui Tingting dyed her hair Mars red for the arrival of the Chinese spacecraft to the planet known in Chinese as the Fire Star.
“This is a great era for space, and the future of humanity lies in space exploration,” said Cui, director of the China Mars Society, the local arm of a global advocacy network. She hosted an online party Wednesday evening in anticipation of the announcement that the Tianwen-1 spacecraft, launched last July, had reached Mars orbit.
Video from participants from all over China showed a replica of the Tianwen-1 robotic rover in the home of a member of the association. One of them was wearing a self-made spacesuit; another checked his robot dog.
“Earth is our mother planet … but Mars is the same to me,” Cui said.
China is falling in love with space, inspired by the increasingly ambitious plans of the ruling Communist Party over the past two decades to put humans into orbit and explore the moon and Mars.
Tourists flock to the tropical island of Hainan to watch missiles blow off. Others visit mock Mars colonies in desert areas with white domes, airlocks and space suits. The number of space-themed TV shows, books, and fan clubs is growing.
The most popular space-themed account on the Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo, “Our Space,” has 1.25 million followers.
The expanding space program coincides with President Xi Jinping’s campaign to promote the image of China returning to its former glory as a world leader.
“It is a symbol of power for China,” said Chen Qiufan, a science fiction author in Guangdong whose books feature “Waste Tide.”
Xi’s government is trying to stimulate public enthusiasm with a five-year scientific literacy action plan. It holds a promise of support for the development of Chinese science fiction.
In November, the Beijing city government announced plans to build a science fiction industry cluster area to attract talent and create “ influential original science fiction works. ”
“You have to use the power of movies, movies and science fiction to broadcast propaganda and this idea, we have to get there,” said Chen, comparing it to the Renaissance.
That love affair is also catching on in Japan, India and other countries that are sending probes through the solar system and joining a club of explorers long dominated by Washington and Moscow.
The race to explore Mars is so busy that Tianwen-1 isn’t even the only spacecraft to arrive on the planet this week.
On Tuesday, Amal, a spacecraft launched by the United Arab Emirates, swung into orbit.
In the Emirates’ largest city, Dubai, the government projected images of the two moons of Mars into the sky. The Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai glowed red at night. Billboards with Amal, Arabic for hope, tower over the highways 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 short stories written in half a 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 of Earth’s decayed dystopia, but not so elsewhere, said Tidhar, who grew up in a kibbutz, a collectivist commune in Israel. In his novels “Martian Sands” and “Central Station”, a reborn Soviet Union, China and Israel blossom in the bleak landscape of Mars.
“It’s boring, it’s hot, it’s tight. Kind of 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 Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, when the US-Soviet space race inspired movie studios to release “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Solaris”.
China re-embraced imaginary other worlds with the explosive success of Liu Cixin’s “The Three-Body Problem”, first published as a magazine series from 2006 to 2010. In 2015, Liu became the first Chinese author to receive the Hugo Award, science de highest honor of fiction.
A Hollywood-style blockbuster, “The Wandering Earth,” based on a Liu novella, grossed more than $ 700 million worldwide in 2019.
China became the third country to independently launch an astronaut into orbit in 2003, four decades after the former Soviet Union and the United States.
The first temporary laboratory in orbit was launched in 2011 and a second in 2016. Plans call for a permanent space station after 2022.
Space officials had already expressed hope this year for a manned lunar mission, but said it depended on budget and technology. They have pushed that target back to at least 2024.
Science fiction writers are already portraying Chinese colonies on Mars.
Hao Jingfang’s novel “Vagabonds”, published last year, is set between a poverty-free but austere Martian society and a poor, busy, polluted earth. Hao became the first female Chinese author to receive the Hugo Award in 2016.
Luo Lingzuo’s 2019 “Land Without Borders” envisions Chinese scientists genetically altering potatoes to grow in amber Mars soil. Physicist Liu Yang’s “Orphans of the Red Planet”, about high school students on Mars fighting hostile aliens, is turned into a TV 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 Mars Society, is already planning another party in May, when the robot lander of Tianwen-1 is about to land.
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Associated Press researchers Caroline Chen in Beijing and Chen Si in Shanghai and writers Isabel DeBre in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Krutika Pathi in New Delhi contributed to this report.