Cui Tingting dyed his hair Mars red for the arrival of the Chinese spacecraft on the planet known in Chinese as the Fire Star.
“This is a great era for space, and the future of humanity lies in exploring outer space,” said Cui, director of the China Mars Society, the local chapter of a global defense network. He hosted an online party Wednesday night to await the announcement that the Tianwen-1 spacecraft, launched last July, had reached orbit of Mars.
Video from participants across China showed a replica of the Tianwen-1 rover robot at the home of a member of the society. One wore a homemade spacesuit; another controlled his robot dog.
“Earth is our mother planet … but for me, Mars is the same,” 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 the rockets take off. Others visit simulated Mars colonies in desert sites with white domes, airlocks and spacesuits. The number of space-themed TV shows, books, and fan clubs is growing.
The most popular space-themed account on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo microblogging service “Our Space” has 1.25 million followers.
The expanding space program coincides with President Xi Jinping’s campaign to promote an image of China returning to its former glory as a world leader.
“It is a symbol of power for China,” said Chen Qiufan, a Guangdong science fiction author whose books include “Waste Tide.”
The Xi government is trying to build public enthusiasm with a five-year Science Literacy Action Plan. It includes 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 works of science fiction.”
“You have to harness the power of movies, movies and science fiction to transmit propaganda and this idea: we have to go there,” Chen said, likening it to the Renaissance.
That love story is also catching on in Japan, India and other countries that are sending probes across the solar system, joining a club of explorers long dominated by Washington and Moscow.
The race to explore Mars is so crowded that Tianwen-1 isn’t even the only spacecraft to hit the planet this week.
On Tuesday, Amal, a spacecraft launched by the United Arab Emirates, went into orbit.
In the Emirates’ largest city, Dubai, the government projected images of the two moons of Mars in the sky. Dubai’s Burj Khalifa skyscraper glowed red at night. Billboards representing Amal, Arab for Hope, tower over the roads of Dubai.
In India, one of the country’s biggest movie stars, Akshay Kumar, directed 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 Science Fiction” captures this global wonder, said the book’s publisher, Lavie Tidhar.
In American and British science fiction, Mars often represents the pristine utopia of Earth’s decrepit dystopia, but not 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 flourish in the desolate landscape of Mars.
“It’s boring, it’s hot, it’s tight. A bit like growing up on 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 space race between the United States and the Soviet Union inspired film studios to release “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Solaris.”
China once again embraced other imaginary worlds with the explosive success of Liu Cixin’s “The Three Body Problem”, first published as a serial magazine from 2006 to 2010. In 2015, Liu became the first Chinese author on receive the Hugo Prize, science fiction’s highest honor.
A Hollywood-style blockbuster, “The Wandering Earth,” based on a novel by Liu, grossed more than $ 700 million worldwide in 2019.
China became the third nation to put an astronaut into orbit on its own in 2003, four decades after the former Soviet Union and the United States.
Its first lab in temporary orbit was launched in 2011 and a second in 2016. Plans call for a permanent space station after 2022.
Space officials had expressed hope for a manned lunar mission as early as this year, but said that was up to budget and technology. They have delayed that goal until at least 2024.
Sci-fi writers are already imagining Chinese colonies on Mars.
Hao Jingfang’s novel “Vagabonds”, published last year, is situated between an austere Martian society without poverty and a poor, crowded and polluted Earth. Hao became the first Chinese author to receive the Hugo Award in 2016.
Luo Lingzuo’s 2019 “Land Without Borders” imagines Chinese scientists genetically altering potatoes to grow in Martian amber soil. Physicist Liu Yang’s “Orphans of the Red Planet,” about high school students on Mars fighting hostile aliens, is being turned into a television series.
“We need to go to space,” said Chen, a science fiction author in Guangdong. “Then we will 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 Tianwen-1 landing robot lands.
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She is a freelance blogger, writer, and speaker, and writes for various entertainment magazines.