I'm John Bachelor, Gordon Chang at Gordon G. Chang, my colleague and co-hosts, Starship Troopers.

Hollywood made the movie in 1997.

It's based upon Robert Highland's original Starship Troopers, 1959, which is exactly the time I was 11 years old and read everything that had science fiction attached to it, including Starship Troopers.

At the time, it puzzled me because it seemed way over the top, but an 11-year-old doesn't

think that way, kind of like, what's going on here? Why are they killing bugs? Why are they

making strange statements about recruitment? The movie made it even more obvious that this was a send-up, Hollywood's version of

putting down the war-torn effort of the second war and the continuing American conflicts around

the world. In other words, it was a movie with the intention of saying pacifism is better

and warfighting is not, because what it does

to teenagers is it distorts their lives. But Rick Fisher of the International Assessment and

Strategy Center is here. It appears that our PRC adversaries in Beijing either do not have a sense of humor or do not understand irony in

English. Rick, a very good evening to you. If I understand it, we're anticipating at some point

that the PRC space program will turn into starship troopers.

Is that an exaggeration or are we looking at them actually feeling battalions of space cadets?

Good evening to you.

Good evening, John.

In a sense, the Chinese space program has been a military space program from the beginning. My writing over the last 25 years on China's space program has been just that plotting every step that the People's

Liberation Army has used the Chinese space program at a minimum to squeeze out dual use purposes,

dual use benefits.

The astronaut corps of China is called the Astronaut Brigade of the People's Liberation Army.

So all astronauts are members of the PLA.

Now, so far, they're not shooting in space. They're not transporting artillery to the moon, but

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