China counts down to join elite manned spaceflight club

The countdown has begun for China's first manned space mission - its attempt to join Russia and America in an exclusive club established more than 40 years ago by the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

A single astronaut, or taikongaut as the Chinese call them, is expected to go into an orbit about 125 miles above Earth for less than 24 hours before his vessel returns.

China guards its space secrets closely but the launch of the Shenzhou V from a site in Gansu, near the Gobi desert, seems scheduled for Thursday or Friday, just after the annual plenary of the Communist Party's central committee.

Pictures of the national space centre and of launch pad scaffolding have been spread over the front pages of newspapers since Sunday. "Our launch centre is simply the most beautiful," said a headline in the Beijing Morning Post.

The driving force behind the space programme is the former president Jiang Zemin, a one-time electronic engineer. And for a leadership almost exclusively assembled from engineers, the cost of the launch will be justified by the surge of nationalistic pride that China, which has repeatedly refused offers by Russia to put a man in space, will have trumped Japan, Europe and India by "putting the spam in the can". China is also talking about putting a man on the Moon by 2010 and establishing a space station of its own. It also wants a Hubble-like space telescope and a skylab.

A successful launch will also be a triumph for the military. China's space programme is almost the only successful part of the vast and costly military industrial complex set up by Chairman Mao Dezong and which at its peak employed 16 million people.

The manned launch was originally scheduled for 2000 and has repeatedly been delayed.

Amid all the setbacks, China has nevertheless managed to build a competitive rocket and satellite industry that has even been able to pay its way. The initial investment was huge. The country built three satellite launch centres, each sited in remote and inaccessible areas.

After overcoming severe logistical difficulties, the Chinese launched their first satellite in 1971, which circled the Earth broadcasting the Maoist anthem "The East is Red". It caused a sensation.

But just how much the space programme costs is kept a secret, perhaps because the country still has hundreds of millions of citizens earning less than a dollar a day, and often pleads poverty when urged to help Aids victims or educate rural children.