Specialist Communities in China’s Aerospace Technology and Innovation System: The Cultural Dimension

Only two decades ago, China was a marginal player in the global aerospace industry. Today, the pace of China’s space programs is unparalleled and it has joined the sector’s leading ranks. China is the only country after the Soviet Union/Russia and the United States to independently send humans into orbit and a rover to touch down on the Moon. A Chinese station will likely soon be only the only long-term human habitat circling the Earth alongside the International Space Station. Within a decade, China could become only the second country in history to land a person on the Moon’s surface. China already has the world’s largest radio telescope and is building more large instruments. The country’s advances in aeronautics are no less striking. A Chinese firm has disrupted the regional jet market and is poised to enter the large civil aircraft market, challenging the Airbus-Boeing duopoly. Chinese firms already produce advanced military aircraft that fly sensitive missions

The Peaks of Eternal Light: a Near-term Property Issue on the Moon

The Outer Space Treaty makes it clear that the Moon is the province of all mankind, with the latter ordinarily understood to exclude state or private appropriation of any portion of its surface. However, there are indeterminacies in the Treaty and in space law generally over the issue of appropriation. These indeterminacies might permit a close approximation to a property claim or some manner of quasi-property. The recently revealed highly inhomogeneous distribution of lunar resources changes the context of these issues. We illustrate this altered situation by considering the Peaks of Eternal Light. They occupy about one square kilometer of the lunar surface. We consider a thought experiment in which a Solar telescope is placed on one of the Peaks of Eternal Light at the lunar South pole for scientific research. Its operation would require nondisturbance, and hence that the Peak remain unvisited by others, effectively establishing a claim of protective exclusion and de facto appropriation. Such a telescope would be relatively easy to emplace with todays technology and so poses a near-term property issue on the Moon. While effective appropriation of a Peak might proceed without raising some of the familiar problems associated with commercial development (especially lunar mining), the possibility of such appropriation nonetheless raises some significant issues concerning justice and the safeguarding of scientific practice on the lunar surface. We consider this issue from scientific, technical, ethical and policy viewpoints.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figures (color). Space Policy in pres

China-U.S. Relations in Commercial Space and Aircraft Manufacturing: Specialist Cultures and Patterns of Transnational Industry Integration

While commercial space is often represented as posing unique technical and market barriers to new entrants, it shares some of these features with other high-technology sectors. Governments fostering the entry of their national industry players into global space markets face challenges similar to those of nurturing national champions in other globalized sectors. In some sectors, governments adopt policies promoting the integration of their industry to a global sector as a means to building national technical capacity. In other sectors, governments foster the development of indigenous capabilities in an industry before supporting its participation in a global market. This paper explores why governments pursue transnational integration strategies in some sectors and national development strategies in others. This paper examines this question through a comparison of trade relations between China and the United States in the commercial space and commercial aircraftmanufacturing sectors. China-U.S. relations have taken strikingly different courses in these two sectors. In the aircraft sector, the two countries\u27 industries have integrated their activities across a range of subsectors and products. By contrast, in space, their industries have not traded or integrated their activities. This research examines why and how China-U.S. relations have evolved differently in these two sectors since 1989. The divergent trajectories taken by China-U.S. relations in these two sectors are puzzling because both sectors present similar incentives and disincentives for transnational industry integration. For example, the Chinese and U.S. economies feature important complementarities in both sectors. Technology transfers also carry defense implications that present obstacles to trade in both sectors. Existing theoretical perspectives on strategic international trade do not explain this sectoral variation. This paper proposes that this variation is traceable to differences in the specialist cultures shared by participants in commercial air and space. These cultures vary across the two sectors, but are shared across countries. Air and space specialists tend to hold different philosophical conceptions of market and technical barriers to entry, underpinned by different theories of technical change and economic globalization. The assumptions of sectoral specialists shape government choices on technology and trade policy and influence industry strategies in both China and the United States. An empirical and qualitative process-tracing approach allows for inferences about whether and how contrasting sectoral cultures account for the international outcomes under study. Data for this study was collected through over 120 interviews with participants in the Chinese and U.S. air and space sectors, participant observation, and document analysi

China and the United States in Civil-commercial Air and Space: Specialist Cultures and International Relations in High-technology Sectors

Why are some high-technology sectors trans-nationally integrated while others are sites of interstate competition? This dissertation explores this question through a comparison of China-U.S. relations in two strategic, high-technology sectors: civil-commercial aircraft manufacture and civil-commercial spacecraft manufacture. Between 1989 and 2009, China-U.S. relations took strikingly different trajectories in these two sectors. In the aircraft sector, the two countries’ industries traded and integrated their activities and their civil agencies cooperated. By contrast, in the space sector, their industries did not trade or integrate, their civil agencies did not cooperate, and the two countries engaged in a form of technological competition. The divergent trajectories taken by China-United States relations in these two sectors are puzzling because both sectors present similar incentives and disincentives for both transnational integration and interstate competition. Theories of international relations do not fully explain this sectoral variation. This research indicates that this variation is traceable to underlying differences in how specialists in each sector, including technical and policy experts, implicitly reason about and represent technologies in general. In both countries, the air and space specialist communities each hold distinct understandings of the relationship between humans and technology. Performing representational practices that reflect these distinct assumptions, aeronautic and space specialists discursively constitute each sector and its technologies as distinct objects of policy, requiring different forms of state action. In air, these include policies adopted by both countries to enhance bilateral trade, industrial partnership, and technical cooperation. In space, these include measures to inhibit bilateral trade and cooperation while preparing for a coming bilateral confrontation.Ph

State Personhood in Ontological Security Theories of International Relations and Chinese Nationalism: A Sceptical View

International Relations theory continues to grapple with the question of how to account for the behaviour of corporate actors, such as ethnic groups, social classes or, more often than not, states. The viability of certain theoretical approaches that are potentially relevant to explaining contemporary international relations, including theories of socialization, learning and persuasion, partly hinges on resolving this problem. Although it is widely acknowledged that extrapolating theoretical concepts from the individual level to states operating in an international system can be problematic, International Relations theorists continue to use and defend this approach. They often justify this theoretical position using a Friedman-style instrumental rationale: treating the state as a person is theoretically productive because it generates empirically supported hypotheses