China will build a state of the art missile armed space station and control the world by commerce and military threat.

China now has the wealth and the technology - state of the art - 2008 tech.

America is headed for colony status. The Ancient Chinese power empire is back after several centuries of shadow.

China has made all the right moves in the modern era including buying their factories from Germany, state of the art machinery.

China and the Euro community are giant trading partners as well as the USA.

Because of the fiscal mess in the US, China might let us dangle a bit and link more closely with the Euro nations.

Chinese banks have been ordered not to lend to US banks by the govt. Little reported in the US.

The debate sadly did not take up the rise of China and India as economic powers.

Meanwhile, hats off to them, I hope their populations prosper, I certainlly would not like to live in a world where they continued to be starving and poor.

Still, to judge by the history of other nations that have sponsored space walks, China should be entering its decline pretty soon.

Maybe your headline should read The Past is Present?

he or she is qualified to be thew new governor of alaska.

True, but the Chinese space program has always been about the long-term. The Chinese don't necessarily think in years, or decades, but rather in centuries.

Frankly, their manned space program had been impressive: a slow, deliberate, and decisive series of forward moves intended to achieve the ultimate goal of establishing a permanent presence in space. Although many experts speculate they might beat us back to the moon in the next decade or so, so far as they're concerned, that's not the point. Rather, the point is to create a long-term, stable manned space infrastructure - completely independent of what the U.S, Russia and the Europeans have been doing collectively for the past decade.

As @5 points out, the Chinese recognize going back to the moon has the potential to yield extremely lucrative results, particularly in the area of energy resources. Imagine a China 100 years in the future, completely free from the petroleum noose, with nearly limitless cheap, clean, and safe energy (which harvesting Helium 3 would make possible) at its disposal, in addition to being in a position to reap HUGE economic benefits by selling the technology to other energy-starved nations. They'd put OPEC out of business in a New York minute.

They fully recognize that the oil-producing states have literally fueled the economic engine of the 20th Century, and that any nation possessing both fusion technology, and the means of exploiting the sole source of H3 in our immediate region of the solar system, will become the new engines driving economic and technological progress in this century.

What country WOULDN'T want a piece of that action? So far as I can see, they're doing all the right things to make certain they get some - possibly even most of it.

So, really we shouldn't worry too much about who did what in 1965; I'd be much more concerned about who WILL be doing what in 2065.