China's space activities gain strategic importance

Significance

Its capabilities do not match those of the United States except in a few narrow areas, and may never do so, but they do have increasingly significant strategic implications.

Impacts

• Satellite navigation is the sector with the greatest economic potential for China in the near term.
• Advances in the development of space weapons make arms control both more urgent and more difficult.
• Satellite internet and lunar mining are areas of potential China-US competition in the medium and long term respectively.
• China's lunar programme benefits from more consistent policies than NASA, but suffers from a smaller budget and few international partners.