Comment Re:The Chinese advantage (Score 1) 226
When your government is full of engineers, not lawyers, and when you can just ignore the flat-earth lobby instead of wasting half your funding fighting their just-because-we-can delays, you can test ideas like this.
Also useful: when your government is full of unelected bureaucrats who aren't held accountable by voters, completely dominate the news media, and stomp on any popular organization or sentiment that they don't control, and thus are free to ignore the interests of their citizens and instead spend money on wasteful, thinly-disguised military projects.
(Except, of course, that's not what's actually happening in this case - the article summary makes it sound like "OMG China will dominate space", because of course that's more interesting than "superannuated Chinese scientist spouts nonsense".)