Leading article: A space race rises in the east

For those of us in the Western hemisphere, and perhaps not only here, there was a distinctly retro feel to China's latest venture into space. The blast-off, the space walk – complete with small red Chinese flag – and yesterday's textbook landing in the Inner Mongolian desert were all set pieces familiar from the US and Soviet exploits of yesteryear. Should anyone really be worried about a Chinese space programme that is clearly at such an early stage?

Reason might well say not. China is surely as entitled as any other country to develop a space capacity, if it has the money and the will – which it clearly does. There is nothing intrinsically threatening about it. Yet one glance at the line-up of dignitaries following proceedings from China's mission control demonstrated how intimately the space programme is bound up with China's sense of national pride and its growing power in the world. The live media coverage and President Hu Jintao's personal congratulations also bespoke China's confidence. This was a mission that was not going fail.

In one sense, the televised space walk was a sequel to the Beijing Olympics, another way of encouraging the Chinese to feel good about themselves. But it was also something eminently practical: a crucial stage in China's plan to establish, first, a laboratory in space, and eventually a large space station. In a world where the only other two space powers, the Americans and the Russians, are now co-operating – whether temporarily, or longer term, is hard to say – a third, more unknown quantity, has now entered the field.

Of course, some of the same points that were made about the erstwhile Soviet Union can be made about China today. Beijing might be able to sent men into space and even film them "walking" outside their capsule, but China is also a country in which one in 10 people subsist on the equivalent of $1 a day and schools collapse in earthquakes because state building funds have been corruptly diverted. It is also a country in which, at the very same time as its tethered astronaut emerged triumphantly from his spaceship, more than 50,000 babies had became ill through contaminated milk.

Such contradictions, though, are unlikely to halt, or even pause, China's space programme. The past few days' television pictures were rather the most graphic proof to date that the region, and the world, will have to get used to a new player whose presence will profoundly change the balance of power as it has evolved over the past century. China's rise so far may have been as peaceful as its leaders and ideologists contend, but Beijing's plans for space should be cause for vigilance.

With the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty now in abeyance, thanks to President Bush and his ambitions for national missile defence, there is now no international regulatory framework that China could be invited to join. The argument for some updated treaty that would constrain the militarisation of space is compelling. The unpalatable alternative is the start of a new competition for supremacy in space.

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