In "To Reach for the Moon", Melinda Liu and Mary Carmichael discuss China's motivations for going to the Moon. They see it not primarily as a bid for superiority in space, but as an effort to improve national prestige as well as find a possible source of energy. A mission in 2007 was directed to finding the amount of a stable Helium isotope which could provide "an abundance of radioactivity-free energy" (55). If the mission to obtain this energy was a success, China could become an energy mogul much like Russia is today in Europe. If they were to find insufficient resources, landing on the Moon would still be a remarkable achievement for the Chinese.
Source: Liu, Melinda, and Mary Carmichael. "To Reach For the Moon." 2007. In The Next
Space Age, edited by Christopher Mari, 54-55. Vol. 80. The Reference Shelf
5. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 2008.
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