This Week in China's History: The Dongfang Hong satellite is launched

April 24, 1970

Listen to the audio narration by Kaiser in the embedded player above!

For three weeks in the spring of 1970, anyone with a radio tuned to the right frequency could hear a haunting melody being broadcast from the heavens. The song had been blaring ceaselessly from radios, loudspeakers, and televisions around China for a decade now — The East is Red, a succinct and audacious summary of a cult of personality. Based on a Shaanxi folk tune extolling the virtues of cabbage and sesame oil, the song’s new lyrics, written in the 1940s, celebrate Mao as “the people’s great savior” who will lead the masses to build a new China. Now its revolutionary and hagiographic message could be heard around the world as it was broadcast from China’s first satellite — itself named Dong Fang Hong — as it circled the Earth following its launch on April 24, 1970. That the satellite became an homage to Mao, repeating the Cultural Revolution’s anthem, was a bitter irony as Mao’s war on science and promotion of ideology over rational inquiry nearly stymied China’s attempts to join the ranks of space-going nations.