In China, Elon Musk is like Janus: he has two heads. On the one hand, an American who opens a mega-auto factory in Shanghai in 2019, at the worst moment of the trade war between China and the United States, cannot, in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party, be fundamentally bad. . Especially since neither human rights nor the democratic future of Taiwan seem to obsess him unduly. As for the anti-Communists, they do not hide their admiration for this libertarian who says aloud what many of them think quietly.
On the other hand, however, he is the founder of Starlink. For a regime that relies in part on information control, this myriad of satellites launched by a partner company of the US Department of Defense poses a real threat. Acquiring a Starlink terminal is strictly prohibited in China. But there is more: according to a “note verbale” sent by China to the United Nations, in December 2021, two satellites of the constellation nearly collided with the Chinese space station on 1is July and October 21.
Each time, according to Beijing, the Chinese station had to urgently carry out an avoidance maneuver. These incidents have added fuel to the permanently smoldering fire between Beijing and Washington. The Chinese Foreign Ministry claims to have sent several emails to the State Department to complain. The latter denies having received them. The Chinese military-industrial lobby has drawn the consequences: “A combination of soft and hard measures would have to be taken to render Starlink satellites inoperative and to destroy the constellation’s operational system”wrote several researchers in an article published in the journal Modern Defense Technologyin April.
“Target different markets”
But in this country which has made the conquest of space one of the symbols of its greatness, the response to Starlink cannot but be destructive. Does China need a comparable constellation? Not easy. “Public operators have built the best 4G-5G network in the world in China. I just did a round trip to Gansu [dans l’ouest du pays]. Apart from the tunnels, I was able to communicate throughout the trip and even had a Zoom meeting for an hour. Starlink is a good “back-up” to AT&T and T-Mobile in the United States, but, in my opinion, an Internet satellite network in China should target different markets, such as aeronautics or maritime transport”, judge Tianyi Lan, CEO of Ultimate Blue Nebula, a space consultancy firm based in Beijing.
You have 51.41% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.