'A complete, rapid, and unplanned dismantling. (...) A great day!' Elon Musk wrote on Twitter on 16 January 2015. This text accompanies a photograph of a rocket from his aerospace company SpaceX exploding on landing. For years, SpaceX’s rocket development has been easy to follow online, for example via tweets from CEO Musk. The fact that rockets sometimes explode in the early stages is not a problem; Musk is just as eager to share these cases of “rapid unplanned dismantling,” as he euphemistically calls them, with the world.
“Something like that is unthinkable in the Chinese aerospace world,” says Marc Klein Wolt about Musk’s Twitter posts. Klein Wolt is the Director of the Radboud Radio Lab of Radboud University in Nijmegen. This lab developed the Netherlands-China Low-Frequency Explorer measuring instrument, which travelled with a Chinese lunar satellite in 2019. Losing face, he says, is about the worst thing that can happen to a Chinese person. “Everything and everyone is focused on preventing it. This means that you don’t flaunt your mistakes. If you do, people will soon stop taking you seriously. Something like that can even affect your career prospects.”
Americans proudly presenting their past mistakes and Chinese people hiding their failures as deep as possible is just one of the world’s cultural differences. How do you reconcile all these cultural differences with realising something that is vital to all cultures, namely reducing humanity’s ecological footprint and greening our energy supply as fast as possible? Whether countries want it or not: this requires cooperation. But how do you cooperate if you don’t really understand the other party? Or if you don’t really want to cooperate at all? Can we learn anything from the cultural clash and technological race that led to the moon landings half a century ago?
Advantages and disadvantages
Klein Wolt has an international network. The project with the Chinese lunar satellite is still ongoing, but he is also in regular contact with US, Chinese and European colleagues about, for example, building a radio telescope on the moon. He also speaks to many European astronomers and engineers and has lines of communication with Africa, where his team hopes to realise a new radio telescope, the African Millimetre Telescope. “With all these different contacts, you have to take cultural differences into account,” he says. “I think in advance: okay, this is Africa, China, the US, France, or Germany and they do things differently there from what we’re used to in the Netherlands. For example: can you talk openly about mistakes? To what extent are they proud of their own culture? Do they step to the fore or are they quieter? How hard are agreements once they’re put on paper? These things vary a lot from culture to culture. If you don't pay attention to these things, you will definitely go wrong.”
In fact, many cultural aspects have advantages and disadvantages, says Klein Wolt. For instance, he calls the governance culture in China very rigid (everyone follows the leader), but due to the aforementioned fear of losing face, the Chinese are also strongly solution-oriented, and even quite flexible. They already start coming up with solutions to problems that don’t even exist yet. Klein Wolt recalls an incident at Jiuquan launch base in 2019, about a month before the launching of the satellite with his measuring instrument. “There was a wire sticking out of the satellite, in the exact spot where our instrument was supposed to be. It turned out to be a temperature sensor that was not on the construction drawing. I could already see the trouble ahead, because in Europe or the US, such a thing would definitely lead to months of redesign and delays. In China, after a brief consultation, the chief engineer grabbed a pair of scissors and cut the wire; that sensor could also be put somewhere else.”
In the United States, Klein Wolt sees projects being announced with great bravado, but he knows you have to take those plans with a grain of salt. “They’ve been saying for decades that they will be landing on the moon any moment now, but it still hasn’t happened. On the other hand, if the Chinese say they’re going to do something, you can be sure that they will. They don’t take the risk that something might not work. On the other hand, the Americans are more able to learn from their mistakes because they don't run away from them.”
Distrust
There was no question of open collaboration between Klein Wolt’s team and the Chinese space engineers. Both sides kept as much information to themselves as possible. “I was asked for the blueprints of our device. I was willing to give them, on the condition that I could see their blueprints. But they just laughed at the suggestion.”
Back to the climate issue. Does Klein Wolt have any advice for developers of green technology, e.g. new wind turbines and batteries? “Make sure you keep the heart of your knowledge to yourself; after all, so does the other party. If you give that away, they won’t call you next time. Incidentally, this is something I would also do when working with, say, the United States. Moreover, this kind of distrust is not necessarily a bad thing. I found that protecting our knowledge and expertise earned me a certain amount of respect.”
Urge to prove yourself
Could you call the climate problem a culture clash? Countries squabble at climate conferences over the question of who should pay for this transition. But is it also an epic race that can push countries to great achievements and make them do the almost impossible, as with the moon landing in the 1960s? Klein Wolt definitely sees a kind of urge to prove oneself in China, also when it comes to the climate. “They want to portray themselves as a world power that can solve the big problems, one of which is climate change.”
Incidentally, Klein Wolt wouldn’t mind this kind of climate race in the least. “It is precisely because of the space race that NASA developed in an incredible way; before that, they did not amount to much as an organisation. You cannot deny that extremely rapid strides were made in those days in terms of knowledge and technology. Let’s have a similar race about sustainability. Let us compete for the title of climate transition champion. Wouldn’t that be great? Then the solutions will come naturally.”
This article is a translation of a piece, written by Roel van der Heijden for Kennislink. Photo: Gerd Altmann via Pixabay