On Monday the Defense Department issued the 2008 edition of “Military Power of the People’s Republic of China”, an annual report that assesses Chinese military capabilities. There’s a brief section titled “Space and Counterspace” that offers a general overview, including a brief discussion of the January 2007 ASAT test and related developments. One sentence of the report claims that, in addition to its groundbased direct ascent ASATm “China is developing other technologies and concepts for kinetic and directed-energy (e.g., lasers and radio frequency) weapons for ASAT missions,” but goes into no further details.

That’s different from just a few years ago when, in the 2004 report, the DoD claimed that China was developing “parasitic microsatellite” technology: a small satellite that would presumably be able to approach and destroy or disable another satellite. The 2004 report cautioned, “This claim is being evaluated,” and, as it turns out, the claim was unsubstantiated: it was traced back to the web site of a “self-described ‘military enthusiast’” with little credibility.

This is an egregious example, but hardly the only one, of misinterpretation of information of Chinese space capabilities and intentions. In an article in Monday’s issue of The Space Review, I describe a recent presentation that examines the miscommunication between the US and China on space issues. Gregory Kulacki of the Union of Concerned Scientists described research he performed where he examined 1,500 articles published in China since 1971 that mention ASATs. Most of those articles are general reviews or polemics, but get far more attention in the US than the much smaller number of technical articles that could provide more accurate insights into Chinese capabilities and intents. “A lot of the information that our analysts and intelligence officers are consuming—that’s driving their perceptions of Chinese intent regarding their civil and their military space programs—is based on very shoddy sources,” he said.

This creates an echo chamber involving the “polemical communities” in the US and China, who react to each others’ publications regardless of the quality of the information they contain. “There is this whole tiny dialogue between these two hawkish communities in these two countries that dominates the entire discussion on this in the public domain,” Kulacki said.

This doesn’t mean that China isn’t a threat to US security, in space or elsewhere (something that Kulacki acknowledges), but that the information that underlies the debate may sometimes be of questionable quality. Given that China’s civil space capabilities and plans are increasingly trotted out as arguments for continuing or accelerating NASA’s own exploration initiatives, that’s something to keep in mind.