First Chinaman On The Moon

One year on from the Olympics -a truimph of celebrating diversity-in 2013 China is going for a moon shot. Will internet conspiracy nuts claim this to as they claim 1969 moon landings is going to be a studio fake?

China is also aiming to put Men on Mars. In a list of things that science fiction got right and got wrong about the future - did it ever imagine that the first men on Mars would be from China. The only example of Chinamen in space -sort of -i can think of is Ming in the old Flash Gordon adventures.

The Discovery & History channels had docus on how it was the work of Nazi rocket science which really enabled the US to reach the moon. As one person put it we like to think of America winning the space race against the Soviets as a triumph of democracy .
Even the true endgame of the cold war has another outcome. With the fall of the USSR , Asia -that is semi-Socialist India and Communist China - rentered the free market driven world. Billions of industrius Asiatics. For America companies in search of easy short term profits rather the future export markets- this was the means to boost profits by having much of their producton outsourced to low wage low cost Asia.
Only in the long term this corporate greed has destroyed employmentt for Americam workers.

Back in 1985 the BBC run a series called The Triumph Of The West. Someone wrote a letter in The Radio Times saying it was all wrong and what Spengler had predicted in his 1918 book Decline Of The West - would happen. The West would go on to transfer its technological base to Asia for short term profits.