Jim Oberg has a good analysis of their plans.

China has launched five Shenzhou vehicles in a period of four years, which is not an impressive launch rate. But each one was meticulously handcrafted with improvements based on previous flight experience. Now that the design has been validated and standardized, the same level of expenditure will probably be able to manufacture and launch at least twice as many vehicles in the same time period.

That means we should be able to expect two to four Chinese manned flights per year over the next five years, with mission durations of up to several weeks. Some flights will test new technologies and new flight techniques. Others will assemble and use the ?space train? of linked orbital modules. Depending on international negotiations, one or more may visit the space station as a symbolic demonstration. China may take representatives of its own space partners ? perhaps a Brazilian, perhaps a Pakistani, perhaps even a European ? into orbit.

Sorry, but it doesn’t sound to me like anything likely to cause angst in the American psyche any time soon.

[Update on Tuesday]

Well, the comments section is on fire. I may have to reconsider my position, because Marcus Lindroos and I seem to be in agreement. 😉

I’ve got some response to a lot of this, but I think that I’m going to put it in a column, either for Fox or National Review, so I’ll just let the commenters continue for now. Suffice it to say that I continue to believe that this is much ado about, if not nothing, then very little, and that in fact people who fear, for whatever reason, China’s space program should take great heart from the expensive (perhaps ultimately unaffordable) and unimaginative way in which they’re going about it…

When they stop emulating the Russians (and NASA) and start taking their technical lead from the American entrepreneurs, then I’ll start to worry.