Reaction to Shuttle Loss a Milestone for Chinese

PEKING — Until last week, the nightly news program broadcast to an estimated 200 million Chinese had maintained an unbroken record: It had always led off with an item dealing with China.

The day after the Challenger disaster, however, this record was broken when the news program began with a lengthy report on the loss of the American space shuttle and its crew of seven. Not until later in the broadcast did the viewers learn that Hu Yaobang, general secretary of China’s Communist Party, had received visiting Japanese officials that day.

The loss of the Challenger seems to have struck a deep chord in China, and to have marked something of a milestone in Chinese attitudes toward the outside world.

Until very recently, events that provoked international concern attracted little attention here. The famine in Africa and last year’s earthquakes in Mexico, for example, brought official offers of assistance but little in the way of widespread public interest.

But the shuttle explosion evoked a rare if not unprecedented outpouring of sympathy.

“I am very sorry,” a young Chinese woman volunteered to an American reporter the other day. “At my office, it’s all we have been talking about. . . . We are all part of the same world, and we are very, very sad.”

The strong reaction is partly an outgrowth of the open-door policies pursued under Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. One official said privately that he feels the controlled Chinese news media have been anxious to show that they can give an international event the same attention that European or American media give it.

The intense interest here in the shuttle disaster also reflects China’s continuing fascination with the United States and surprise at the fallibility of American technology, in which the Chinese have placed great faith.

Two weeks before the accident, a Chinese source confided that Reference News, a government publication of restricted circulation that reprints foreign news reports, was giving heavy display to articles about technological failures in the Soviet Union and playing down accounts of such problems in the United States.

“That’s how we know our government still favors the U.S.,” the source said.

After the shuttle explosion, the source said, Reference News, which is not distributed to foreigners, reprinted a commentary from the Soviet newspaper Pravda questioning whether there might be a similar technological failure if the United States proceeds with its Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars,” program. Last year, China went on record in opposition to “Star Wars.”

Finally, China’s immersion in the tragedy of the Challenger is a reflection of the nation’s interest in science and space programs in general and in the U.S. shuttle program in particular.

When the Chinese-American astronaut Taylor Wang flew on the Challenger last May, the Liberation Daily, Shanghai’s official Communist Party newspaper, hailed him as “the first descendant of the Yellow Emperor to travel in space.” Last summer Wang visited China, and Premier Zhao Ziyang told him, “The Chinese nation shares your pride.”

Historians contend that the rocket is actually a Chinese invention, an outgrowth of the Chinese use of gunpowder. An article two years ago in the Chinese magazine Exploring Nature argued that artillery used in China in the Song Dynasty in 1161 constituted the world’s first primitive rocket.

China has been proceeding with its own space program. Last fall, China launched its 17th satellite.