Reflections on Space Governance by China and Japan

• Citation: Vol. 48 No. 3
• Publication year: 2020
• topic: Aeronautics

Reflections on Space Governance by China and Japan

Saadia M. Pekkanen^*

I am very glad to have the opportunity to reflect on the theme of space governance at a historical juncture in a changing world order. Governing outer space is getting harder to do, with the changing technologies in space activities, the rise of new stakeholders, and the geopolitical flux around us today.¹ We are talking about developing peaceful relations through governance frameworks in a space domain in which peace is not a given. In fact, peaceful prospects in outer space are at a low point, and outright conflict is a distinct possibility. So, it is all the more important today to think about the building blocks of space governance, and what is and is not possible if we want to avoid conflict and war in and through space.

I will be concentrating my remarks on two spacefaring countries, China and Japan, to give a regional flavor to broader global debates about space governance. China and Japan are of course not new entrants, but long-standing and established ones. They are also embedded within the global legal governing frameworks. As some of the world's top, technically competent, and politically ambitious space powers, what China and Japan do or don't do at the domestic and regional levels is also significantly likely to shape the peaceful prospects for outer space. Like all other spacefaring powers today, they too have to perform the balancing act between encouraging democratization, boosting commercialization, and containing militarization. This is where space governance needs to situate itself, with attention to the role of states and industrial strategies, including national interests in strategic dual-use sectors like space. Given their pivotal status in the world order today, the interests of the Japanese and Chinese states are especially pivotal as a handful of the world's top and independent space powers who back and consume technologies, make strategies and policies, and, of interest here, put their own designs on governance.

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With this context in mind, I want to reflect on three interrelated questions. First, to begin with, what is governance? I draw on long established thinking in international relations as well as international law to say that for stakeholders in the space domain, this broadly means formal and informal laws, institutions, processes, and practices that structure relations, stabilize expectations, guide and restrain behavior, and frame policy responses. In theory, governance is meant to develop a common legal and policy understanding that can provide predictability, clarity and consistency for all players.

If the aim of states is to use space peacefully based on a set of principles in governing frameworks, their efforts to do so are complicated by the deeply intertwined forces of democratization, commercialization, and militarization I noted at the start.² Democratization has brought new and varied players into the game, who don't necessarily see eye to eye on where space governance or legal interpretation should head. Commercialization has brought in a new generation of technology entrepreneurs bent on profiting all the way to off-world settlements, often backed by law and policy from their home governments pitted against those of other equally determined governments. Militarization affects national security architectures, postures, and warfighting supremacy, and today it is moving towards outright weaponization, with ASAT testing out in the open. Just think of China in 2007, USA in 2008, and India in 2019, and Japan too has a history of testing counterspace technologies.

What all this means is that despite the rise of a new generation of exciting new players and entrepreneurs and activities, outer space affairs are still rooted in the geopolitics around us. Peaceful prospects in outer space are at risk today because of how all states—including China and Japan—are bending their dual-use space technologies and trajectories far more rapidly in the direction of militarization, and frankly outright weaponization. Great powers, concerned with their rise and decline in the world order, see space as an amplifier for their power and are restructuring their civilian, commercial, and military strategies to gain supremacy in space. This trend affects even companies that started out with bold visions for commercialization but who are turning to defense contracts to survive. Meanwhile, from the perspective of governance, we also see worrying trends of treaty stasis, decline, and even exit more broadly that may also end up infecting the global legal outer space regime we have in place today.

Second, in this tumultuous mix, what do regional efforts by space powers like China and Japan add to the prospects for the peaceful governance of outer space activities? It helps to understand what these two countries have done to date in terms of shaping the governance of space activities.

Since the early 1990s, each country has taken a keen interest in shaping the governance of outer space activities through the creation of indigenous

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institutions that resonate especially at the regional level. Both countries stress a peaceful and cooperative vision and the importance of socio-economic development. But they have done so through remarkably different institutional types, which call into question Asian...