Making Mars resonate: the role of analogue sites in territorializing China’s outer space imaginaries

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses how Chinese desert landscapes are being used as analogue sites for the public to gain a first-hand and embodied experience of Martian-like landscapes through the scientific, educational, and tourist facilities and activities that Mars Camp in Qinghai province of the People’s Republic of China offers visitors. By analysing accounts and chronicles of visitors’ experiences (mainly based on digital materials showcased by the Mars Camp website), this paper focuses on how the said camp rhetorically frames particular features of these landscapes to create both an imaginary and a material continuity between Earth and outer space, one which is produced through voluminous immersive encounters, that is, experiences that expand the very ‘sense’ of territory upwards and outwards.

KEYWORDS:

• outer space
• critical geopolitics
• volumetric turn
• territorialization
• Mars
• People’s Republic of China (PRC)
• resonance

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to express their acknowledgment to Research Assistant Wanying Cui, from University Carlos III of Madrid. Our deepest gratitude goes to Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds for their help and insightful comments as well as the support throughout the process of writing of this paper. The paper has likewise benefited from the detailed, and insightful commentaries of two anonymous reviewers, who have helped us to push the research further.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The State Council Information Office (SCIO) of the PRC issued white papers on space activities in 2000, 2006, 2011, 2016 and January 2022.

2 This discourse has become more prominent under Xi Jinping’s approach to the ‘space dream’ as closely aligned with the ‘great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’, which was made most clear in the SCIO of the PRC’s 2016 space white paper (Pollpeter, 2021).

3 See Byrnes (1994), McCurdy (1997), Sage (2014), Newell (2019) and Deudney (2020) for US astroculture; Jenks (2021) and MacDonald (2008) for a comparison of the United States and the USSR during the Cold War; and Maurer et al. (2011), Gerovitch (2014), Andrews and Siddiqi (2011) and Kohonen (2009) for USSR astroculture. For China, see Goswami and Garretson (2020, pp. 197–234), Suzuki (2013) and Kulacki and Lewis (2009).

4 See Herron (2016) and Fitzmaurice and Henderson (2019) for some legal issues and problematization of Mars colonization.

5 The General Office of Lunar and Deep Space Exploration was formally established in 2008 by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and it relies on the National Astronomical Observatories (NAOC) of the CAS to operate. The NAOC was founded in 2001 and merged existing astronomic observatories, observing stations and space research centres across the country, including those in the said provinces. Besides the cost assumed to build the facilities of the Mars Camp and to develop the project, a plan to invest 2.5 billion yuan (US$374 million) has been set up to expand the site to 67 km² (26 square miles) and attract 2 million visitors a year by 2030 (Mars Camp, 2021; Zhou & Peters, 2019). Also, Mars Camp has developed a partnership with the Beijing Xingchi Exploration Culture Development Group, a private company that provides ‘experiential services’ (Xingzhi Exploring Group, 2021), fusing Chinese traditional values and philosophy and modern life activities (mass-participation sports, outdoor industry, tourism and corporate training, which are the core services provided by the group).

6 See also Business Geography (2019), Ershu (2021) and He (2019) for similar tropes of remoteness and isolation.

7 The same narrative and rhetoric can be traced back in interviews with ‘Mars City’ officials and Cold Lake managers (Muzi, 2020; Zhang, 2022).