BEIJING, May 23 — For years, China has chafed at efforts by the United States to exclude it from full membership in the world’s elite space club. So lately China seems to have hit on a solution: create a new club.
China launched a communications satellite for Nigeria, a major oil producer, in a project that serves as a tidy case study of how space has become another arena where China is trying to exert its soft power.
Not only did China design, build and launch the satellite for Nigeria, but it also provided a huge loan to help pay the bill. China has also signed a satellite contract with another big oil supplier, Venezuela. It is developing an earth observation satellite system with Bangladesh, Indonesia, Iran, Mongolia, Pakistan, Peru and Thailand. And it has organized a satellite association in Asia.
Beijing also is focused on competing in the $100 billion commercial satellite industry.
In recent years, China has managed to attract customers with its less expensive satellite launching services. Yet it had never demonstrated the technical expertise to compete for international contracts to build satellites.
The Nigeria deal has changed that. Chinese engineers designed and constructed the geostationary communications satellite, called the Nigcomsat-1. A state-owned aerospace company, Great Wall Industry Corporation, will monitor the satellite from a ground station in northwestern China. It will also train Nigerian engineers to operate a tracking station in Abuja, their national capital.
Nigeria is a risky customer for any satellite manufacturer. It is consistently rated one of the most corrupt nations
clipped from: With the satellite priced at roughly $300 million, the state-owned Export-Import Bank of China, or China ExIm, granted $200 million in preferential buyer’s credits to Nigeria. The bank often provides the hard currency for China’s soft power aspirations: In Africa, China ExIm has handed out more than $7 billion in loans in recent years, according to one study.
Satellites also are becoming vital to Beijing’s domestic development plans. In the next several years, China could launch as many as 100 satellites to help deliver television to rural areas, create a digital navigational network, facilitate scientific research and improve mapping and weather monitoring. Research centers on microsatellites have opened in Beijing, Shanghai and Harbin, and a new launching center is under construction in Hainan Province.
But China’s focus on satellites has also brought suspicions, particularly from the United States, since most satellites are “dual use” technologies, capable of civilian and military applications. Currently, China is overhauling its military in a modernization drive focused, in part, on developing the capacity to fight a “high tech” war.
China’s determination to develop its own equivalent to the Global Positioning System, or G.P.S.
Most alarmingly to Western countries, China conducted an antisatellite test in January by firing a missile into space, destroying one of its own orbiting satellites and scattering a trail of dangerous debris despite its oft-stated opposition to the use of weapons in space.
Space relations between the powers were already frosty. Washington, responding to scandals over stolen technology, has tried for nearly a decade to isolate the Chinese space program through export restrictions that prohibit the use of American space technology on satellites launched in China. Washington also has prevented China from participating in the International Space Station and, in some cases, stopped Chinese scientists from attending space conferences in America
New York Times
New York Times
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