A brief history of their program, from Joan Johnson-Freese.
I’d note that as long as they follow the Soviets/Russians lead in tech, they won’t be doing anything big. Like the voyages of Zheng He, it seems to be more about prestige than expansion. If and when SpaceX starts to reuse their launchers, that will set the new bar for space activity.
“it seems to be more about prestige than expansion.”
Not sure how you can draw that conclusion. They are making incremental achievements as part of an over arching strategy. Each step demonstrates their abilities and capabilities and always exceed what people here in the USA think their limits are. They very well may be doing this for prestige but that is not mutually exclusive from expansion, which is also prestigious.
I mean that their systems aren’t scalable. They’re just recapitulating what we’ve done in the past, at high expense.
Rand their strategy is to dominate the space over their economic area of interest. You can see this with Beidou:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeiDou_Navigation_Satellite_System
As their area of interest increases their space capabilities will increase as well. Their plan is to use the Long March 5 family to achieve more or less parity with the other superpowers in terms of space based assets. This includes a global positioning system, communications. I know they have been building ELINT aircraft lately so I would not be surprised if they started building similar satellites soon. Then there is the occasional hawkish Chinese PLAAF General commenting on spaceplanes and hypersonic bombers. These people have been laughed at before. I remember the previous laugh was at some Chinese PLAN General claiming they needed to have a carrier fleet to defend the maritime routes near the South China Sea and eventually all the way to the Malacca Strait.
Oh and the Chinese do have private enterprises working in the military weapons business. They have had limited success until now and mostly do components with some trying to pawn off UAVs and things like that. The Chinese keep trying to sell more weapon systems and were successful in selling that SAM system to Turkey. They have also sold several ships to other nations in the Southern China sea like Thailand.
If the competition goes open market expect the Chinese to eventually reply with their own market based space launch services company with “insider” financing. Think Huawei and SMIC.
They are by no means unbeatable however.
http://isssp.in/tag/elint-china/
I do not know how reliable this is but it seems they have something even now.
I couldn’t find the link but Dr. Griffin made a comment on his return from china… something to the effect that a couple Chinese program managers for human spaceflight keep asking him .. how does he keep getting funding for human spaceflight … it seemed to be their number one problem as it was not considered important all to the Chinese government. From the human spaceflight launch numbers it would appear so. The Chinese government has many competing factions for funding and human spaceflight is no where near the top.