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Abstract Existing analyses of US-China relations in matters of space policy have overwhelmingly focused on the contemporary relationship, with a tendency to represent the interaction between the 2 states as primarily competitive for its entire existence. By making use of American archival materials, this article argues that these characterisations are misleading. Instead, the historical evidence shows that an iteration of a 'Chinese space threat' predates contemporary threat perceptions by almost 5 decades. Crucially, however, this first iteration of a 'Chinese space threat' was side-lined to such an extent in the 1970s that cooperation in space policy became possible, leading to some significant technology transfer. This cooperation lasted until the modern articulation of a 'Chinese space threat' began to make such exchanges controversial once again. Analysis of these archival materials, therefore, shows that, while contemporary tensions between the United States and China in outer space are not new, they are also not the norm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Space collaboration has become quite common in recent years, thanks in large part to the high cost of such endeavors. This article reviews a rather early example of space collaboration, the partnership between China and the United States (U.S.) during the period 1978–2000. The collaboration began with general discussions and grew to include the use of Chinese rockets to launch U.S. satellites into orbit. We discuss where this collaboration worked successfully, where it did not, and why it ended. The ultimate collapse of the collaboration highlights the complexity of joint international projects for the factors that caused failure included the Cold War dynamic of geopolitical competition for international military and economic dominance and its continuance into the 1990s in Sino-U.S. relations; the domestic political landscape in both countries, which included bitter Democratic-Republican party rivalries in the U.S. and the top-down centralized decision-making system in China with significant influence by the People's Liberation Army; and the economic interests of U.S. aerospace contractors. But the issue that most directly ended cooperation in space was U.S. concerns about the transfer to China of sensitive satellite and rocket technology. For this history, we draw upon existing English language materials and Chinese language sources that have not been available to English-speaking scholars to illuminate China's involvement in this collaboration. We also describe subsequent Chinese space activities to pursue additional collaboration and offer comments about possible future Sino-U.S. space cooperation, against this backdrop of long-running national security concerns about transfers of knowledge and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]