Red Moon

TA SHU 6 qi ge hao liyou The Seven Good Reasons

My friends, the China Dream is many things. First it has a recent history as a phrase, a plan, and an idea, put forth by President Xi Jinping as part of his attempt to inspire China’s efforts to get through the narrow gate at the start of this century, when problems of various kinds blanketed the countryside like the infamous smog that made Beijing black at noon. Zhongguo Meng, the China Dream, was part of thinking our way through that time, by setting some kind of practical utopian goal in our minds, a vision or a destination we could then work toward. Some said it was also a distraction, or just another way that the Party was exerting its control over us, by taking over even our dreams. A way to reinforce hegemony, and convince us to acquiesce to the Party’s controlocracy, their Great Eyeball and its supposed omniscience. Maybe it was that too. The Party has always been about shaping China’s thinking and therefore its future.

But also, bigger than any given moment or party leader, bigger even than the Party, there is the China Dream that has always existed, part of China itself. Our essential being as Chinese, if there is such a thing, which maybe there is. It’s an expression of the land, a feng shui phenomenon. The China Dream is as old as China, and on any given Sunday you can see people living it, out in the city parks or in the tea shops. It’s a way of being in the world.

And now a way of being out of the world, because we took it to the moon. The China Space Agency had the expertise, and the state-owned enterprises had the capacity, and the taikonauts had the courage and skill, and the state had the economic surplus, much of it in the form of US treasury bonds. Those aren’t looking very strong these days, but still, it was a lot of capital we owned that needed to be invested. Almost two trillion dollars in US bonds, in fact, which needed investing to make it productive, almost you might say to make it real. Part of the China-US codependency that has been growing since 1972, and which has since become so big and important that some people speak of the so-called G2 as being the dominant force in the world, and the only power dynamic that really matters.

As for the moon, the US had already reached it in 1969, and was not prepared to return. Their billionaires returned to the moon before their state agencies, because the American government and people didn’t care. Their space cadets cared, and they made the return in the 2020s, but it was a private return, involving only a few people. Whereas in China, if the Party chooses to do something, then the whole country can be rallied to that cause. One out of every six humans alive, in other words, devoted to the project of establishing a base on the moon. This was far more than needed to do the job! Not every Chinese person was involved, and only a small percentage of China’s capital reserves had to be directed up here, even though it was a pretty big project. But it wasn’t that big, and in the end it was just more infrastructure. So it was possible to propose it at the Party congress of 2022, and two congresses later report on its very substantial progress. Just ten years, but that after all was no faster than the Americans’ Apollo project. It’s just that in our case, it wasn’t finished with landing here. We landed and started building, and kept on building. Now it’s been twenty-five years.

And now we have a very extensive lunar complex, as I showed you a bit during my earlier visit. Our development of the south pole region is really something. There are also lava tubes on the moon that are much bigger than any lava tubes on Earth or Mars, as I have just recently learned to my own great surprise. An emotion that I might name feng shui astonishment. It seems that because there were giant basins of lava flowing on the surface of the moon in its last stage of cooling, moving from high regions to lower ones, hot flows of lava poured underground like dragon arteries, through areas already cooled on the surface, and when these hot flows stopped flowing, some very big tunnels were left behind in the remaining basalt. And in the gentle lunar gravity, and the absence of tectonic activity or any other big moonquakes, these tunnels could hold up through the eons without collapsing. The truth is that nothing much has happened here on the moon since the end of the period of heavy meteor bombardment, some 3.8 billion years ago. So some really big lava tunnels have endured.

These lava tunnels provide spaces for human habitation on a much larger scale than anything we could easily excavate ourselves. I am visiting one such tunnel, which I will tell you more about in a later show, but what I can say now is, it’s very big! Wide, tall, and long. And the interior surface is hard and almost completely airtight. One only has to find the occasional cracks in the wall and coat these with a fixative of graphenated composites that look somewhat like sheets of diamond, and you have a space the size of a big long town, like a riverside town, which can be aerated and heated. Over it lies enough surface rock to protect living things from cosmic radiation and solar flares, and once fossil cometary water is brought in from the polar craters, you have the makings of a long and winding city-state, more like a complete little world than you can readily imagine.

So much to be proud of in our efforts on the moon! And yet nevertheless, people in China ask me all the time, why the moon? We still have so many problems here in China, and everywhere on Earth. How does going to the moon help with those?

Obviously I am not the only lunatic who gets asked this question. The Party came up with its Five Good Reasons, and others have since added more reasons, too instrumental or even cynical or rude to be given official voice. Now that I’ve been around the moon a little bit more, I have made my own list, which I call the Seven Good Reasons, or maybe the Seven Good Excuses. My rough definition of them is as follows:

In fact, in that sense, the moon project reminds me of the Yongle Emperor’s construction of the imperial capital in Beijing, including the Forbidden City and most of its supporting city. Recall please that the imperial capital at that time was Nanjing. And for a long time the greatest city in China had been Hangzhou. Both these cities had good access to the coast, whereas Beijing was too far from the sea, and too close to the Mongols. It was too cold, too windy, too smoggy—too much of all of those unhappy attributes of the capital we have all come to know too well. In feng shui terms, a complete disaster. Might as well have built it in the Gobi, or on top of Chomolungma.

But the Yongle emperor had a very big surplus to deal with. This surplus had been accumulating over so many centuries that it is impossible now to calculate how big it was. It began much earlier than you might think, because a global economy has existed for far longer than many people realize. Most of the Roman silver coins ever minted ended up in China, for instance, and it just kept on like that, century after century. Our trade surplus with the rest of the world ran uninterrupted for more than a thousand years, and even by the Yongle’s time it was clogging the coffers. And capital accumulation without capitalism doesn’t have many opportunities for reinvestment; but silver unspent is just a lump of slag in your basement. Money needs to be spent to become wealth.

As often happens in these situations, infrastructure came to the rescue. A great wall traversing thousands of kilometers? Good idea. A grand canal traversing hundreds of kilometers? Perfect! An entire new capital city? Great idea, no matter the bad location. In fact, if you need to spend lots of capital, the worse the location of your new city the better! So in that sense Beijing was just right. And the fact that the Forbidden City got burned to the ground by a lightning strike, just as its construction was being completed: wonderful! Necessity to do it all again! More money spent; and by the time the Yongle emperor was done, so much capital had been disbursed that that particular dynastic cycle was brought to an abrupt end. The bankruptcy and crash of the Ming dynasty led to the rise of the Qing dynasty, which being from Manchuria was used to living even farther to the north than Beijing. For the Manchu, Beijing was down to the south, more or less in the center of things. A very nice location.

Beijing, the Grand Canal, the Great Wall—and now the moon. You see the pattern. A pattern which sometimes includes dynastic succession.

Note for later: probably best to drop that last line, considering all that is going on. Don’t want to upset the censors.