Population 1,300,000,000

The fellow in charge at that recent slaughter of demonstrators has been arrested.
(He'll probably end up as parts, unless the slaughter wasn't his fault. China is strange that way: if you kill people, then you give other people life.)

I assume an investigation of all the police forces involved is underway.

If the reports read right, another 50,000 local officials have been arrested for corruption, including many who were involved in local land grabs. That number seems high, but who knows?

Here in the states, due process is now often used to take land without paying fair market value for it, and everyone feels pretty powerless to stop it. It will probably require the Congress to pass law limiting abuses of the mechanism by the states.

The Chinese leadership intends to further develop democratic processes and processes to ensure fundamental human rights, and I wish them the best of luck in trying to do so. My guess is that in the end the roles of the Party will end up being limited to those of guaranteeing the political education of political leaders, and the further development of political thinking. One of the big challenges ahead for China will be the translation of Trotsky's works into Chinese, along with the translations into Chinese of the de-classified Soviet archives and the secret correspondence, including in particular all of it relating to China. But these are just guesses, and I am certainly not current on any of this, and very far far away from reports on the current developments in Chinese political thinking. I think that now I don't have the abilities left to follow it, so all of my comments here must be read in that light.

As far as the costs of the Chinese space program, their key goals are world class satellites and teh world's lowest launch costs. These programs are well into the black on a cost benefit basis, and China continues to master the technologies essential to its well-being.

As far as the manned side goes, they are using it to develop technical parity with the rest of the world. It is extremely well focused, and in order to minimize costs they are studying hard the previous experiences of other nations.

You can break out the total number of launches and spacecraft from the currently provided cost estimates and get some estimate of what its future costs will be. The costs of the program are being freely publicly discussed, and they seem to be low enough that the public is giving the program its full support - my guess is probably around 95-98% approval.

The first emperor's tomb will be opened soon. It is rumored that he died in an impact, and I suppose that we'll see shortly. You can be sure that Langley's CAPS study is being examined closely by Chinese space experts, along with other studies of the problem.