I suppose my point is that China, like Russia and the United States, see a comprehensive space program as important to its interests. As the article linked to in the parent notes, these technologies are necessarily dual use, but I see no reason for that to lock us into a Sino-US space race.
China's leaders have ambitious long-term goals for their space program that will be almost impossible to meet on its own (the cost of a Mars mission would be staggering), so cooperation with the US is in their interests as well as ours. China gains access to dual-use technology, we get to massage China's nationalism into something less virulent, and if nothing else, we both get to delay a strategic confrontation.
Hey, I'm just some guy on the internet. But it seems wise to avoid repeating the mistakes of the 20th century and do a better job of accepting the reality of China's rise to great power status and accommodating them into the international system.
