A further investigation has revealed deep relations between the Chinese firm and the Chinese state-owned defense industry.
PLA Links
On the surface, Spacety appears to be a small and private commercial satellite manufacturer based in Changsha City of China’s Hunan Province. But The Epoch Times’s independent investigation has discovered multiple and comprehensive relations between Spacety and China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).Established in 1956 by China’s National Defense Department, CALVT’s first director in the 1950s and 1960s was Qian Xuesen (a.k.a. Hsue-Shen Tsien), who was considered the father of China’s missile system industry. CALVT’s first political officer was Gu Jingsheng, a PLA lieutenant general.
Qian was once a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and California Institute of Technology in the 1950s. He was also a former colonel serving in the U.S. Airforce. The U.S. Department of Justice detained Qian for his involvement in activities related to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). But in 1955, the U.S. government allowed Qian to go back to China, reportedly in exchange for several U.S. pilots who were captured by the PLA during the Korean War.
Ren Weijia, chief technology officer of Spacety, has played a key role in China’s manned space programs, Shenzhou and Tianzhou, in the last two decades.
Xiong Shujie, Spacety’s vice president, was the former deputy director of the design department for Beidou, China’s navigation satellite system that has been a key element in the Chinese military’s long-range strike missile system.
Military-Civil Integration
One of Spacety’s strategic partners listed on its website is the Hunan Military-Civil Integration (MCI) development platform. The MCI platform, also known as the Military-Civil Fusion project, is one of the leading efforts made by the Chinese regime to modernize its military. Through the MCI platform, the Chinese military was able to partner with many Chinese universities and institutions that had already built relations with Western universities and corporations and obtained cutting-edge technologies from the West for China’s military use.
In the past decade, the Chinese regime has made a significant investment in the MCI platforms on different levels of government and military services.
In October 2015, Chinese leader Xi Jinping made MCI a national priority in a meeting of the CCP’s Central Committee, a top decision-making body of the regime, according to reports from China’s state media at the time. The direction was to establish a nationwide system for the management, operation, and policy system for MCI.
Bans by Washington
Chinese regime’s MCI strategy has been targeted by both the Trump and Biden administrations. The U.S. government has blacklisted a bevy of Chinese tech and defense companies that aided the military. Trump issued an executive order that barred U.S. investments in a group of Chinese military-linked companies that form part of the MCI strategy. President Joe Biden later expanded the list of Chinese firms caught by the ban.Spacety is registered in China as a private commercial company. But from its partner list and the backgrounds of its top-level managers, it appears that the small satellite manufacturer is a part of the regime’s MCI efforts.
Although from its appearance, the partnership between China’s Spacety and Russia’s Wagner Group is a collaboration on the private level. However, the deep ties between Spacety and China’s military programs, and the direct involvement of Wagner in the Ukraine War, have clearly revealed a very different aspect of China’s support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
