Last year, many cinema-goers in China would have seen a hit movie called Moon Man. Starring Shen Teng, a famous actor best described as the Chinese equivalent of Hollywood’s Will Ferrell, it revolves around Dugu Yue, a lonely maintenance worker stranded in a lunar research facility after an asteroid hits planet Earth.

His slapstick exploits lifted the spirits of a locked-down nation, helping Moon Man become the second-highest grossing movie of the year. Taking 3.1 billion Yuan (£380 million) so far, it’s already one of the most successful Chinese-language comedy films of all time.

That’s no mean feat given the impact of Beijing’s draconian covid restrictions on box-office takings.

Yet China’s burgeoning fascination with lunar exploration goes beyond mere fiction. For the prospects of the communist superpower creating a real-life version of Dugu Yue has just sparked a major diplomatic row.

Astronaut Wang Yaping waves after disembarking from the return capsule at the Dongfeng landing site in April

At its centre is Bill Nelson, the top official of U.S. space agency NASA, who this week used an interview to make the explosive suggestion that Beijing intends to colonise the Moon and lay claim to its mineral wealth.

‘It’s a fact: we’re in a space race,’ he told Politico, a U.S. website journal that reports on global political and policy news. ‘We better watch out that they don’t get to a place on the Moon under the guise of scientific research. And it is not beyond the realm of possibility that they then say, “Keep out, we’re here, this is our territory.” ’

Nelson suggested that the People’s Republic, or rather its vast military, is now planning to effectively take over the Moon via similar tactics to the ones it has recently used in the South China Sea, where troops have established bases on a number of contested islands.

His fears were echoed by retired astronaut Terry Virts, a former commander of the International Space Station. ‘They want to be the dominant power on Earth, so going to the Moon is a way to show their system is working,’ he warned. ‘There is potentially mischief China can do on the Moon. If they set up infrastructure there, they could potentially deny communications, for example. Having them there doesn’t make things easier. There is real concern about Chinese meddling.’

Behind these pronouncements lies a major concern. Namely: the lunar surface contains large reserves of valuable metals, from iron and gold to platinum, tungsten, and a gas called helium-3, which some scientists believe could one day be used to fuel nuclear fusion plants.

Three crew members of China’s Shenzhou XIII mission returned to Earth safely in April after completing six-month space mission

If a way could be found to transport significant quantities across the 240,000 miles of space between Earth and the Moon, some reckon the Moon’s supplies of helium-3 may solve mankind’s future energy crisis. A single 40-ton consignment could, by the reckoning of some experts, power the U.S. for an entire year, and the Moon is thought to have 1.1 million tons of it.

A country able to plant its flag on the Moon could, in other words, place itself on course to future world domination.

That helps explain why, after decades of indifference, serious efforts are once more being made to send a human being back to the Moon, with the U.S. desperate to get there before its communist rival.

It’s more than 50 years since Apollo 17’s swashbuckling pilot Gene Cernan uttered the last words that a human being would speak on the Moon in the 20th century, when he turned to colleague Harrison ‘Jack’ Schmitt and declared: ‘Okay, Jack, let’s get this mother outta here.’

NASA is hoping to make a return visit by the end of 2025. Shortly before Christmas, its Artemis I mission saw an un-crewed Orion space capsule fly around the Moon. A follow-up, Artemis II, is scheduled to take a crew on a similar journey next year. If all goes according to plan, Artemis III aims to place an American on the Moon by 2025, using a lander developed by Elon Musk’s spacecraft manufacturer, SpaceX.

The Shenzhou-13 spacecraft is launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center

China has for its part opened a new space station called Tiangong, and officials says they want to land ‘taikonauts’ (their version of astronauts) on the Moon by 2030.

Recent years have seen Beijing launch a series of robotic landers and rovers to collect lunar samples. In 2020, its Chang’e 5 spacecraft returned home with a collection of exotic rock fragments, the first time since the Soviet Union’s Luna mission in 1976.

A Chang’e 6 robotic mission aims to soon collect further samples, while Chang’e 7 and 8 will make preparations for a scientific base at the Moon’s south pole.

In a lecture this week, Wu Yansheng, chairman of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation hinted at the communist administration’s long-term plan by showing animated film of an astronaut with a People’s Republic flag descending from a lander onto the lunar surface. A second clip depicted a pair of astronauts, a planted flag and a rover.

While exploration of the Moon is entirely legal, international law (on paper) currently prohibits any person or country from attempting to turn it into their property.

The rules governing its future are set out in the UN’s Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which bars nations from making territorial claims on any celestial body. Both China and the US are among the 102 countries who signed it.

What nobody knows, however, is how such a law might fare in court, since the treaty has never been properly tested. ‘International law in outer space is not as well developed as it should be,’ is how Ian Crawford, a planetary scientist at Birkbeck College, London, puts it.

Similar grey areas in international law have led to some friction on planet Earth between competing powers seeking to develop and secure ownership of both the Arctic and Antarctic.

With this in mind, Victoria Samson, Washington office director of the Secure World Foundation, which is dedicated to the peaceful use of outer space, admits that competition between Washington and Beijing for ‘limited landing sites and resources’ on the lunar surface could create friction. ‘That’s where we have made the argument that there is a need to engage with China,’ she told Politico this week, ‘because of the possibility of landing near each other or having to provide emergency services to astronauts or taikonauts’.

Other experts are less convinced that any intergalactic conflict is imminent.

‘There is obviously some kind of rivalry between the U.S. and China, and it would be naive to think this doesn’t intrude into space,’ says Dr Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society. ‘Space has already been militarised, with spy satellites being a good example. But the Moon is a huge place and it’s very difficult to see how astronauts would need or be able to mount a land grab.’

Dr Massey adds that, although there are valuable metals on the lunar surface, we are nowhere near being able to mine them. And the potential uses of helium-3 have yet to be properly proven.

‘Yes, China may want to assert itself as a global space power and push boundaries, but that is quite different to some sort of colonial dispute. It’s perhaps more similar to the sort of space race we saw between the U.S. and USSR during the Cold War.’

Be that as it may, China has been incensed by Bill Nelson’s comments, responding via a barrage of critical articles in its State-sponsored media outlets, several of which (perhaps fairly) accuse the NASA chief of fear-mongering in order to persuade the U.S. Congress to sign off his organisation’s $24 billion annual budget.

The People’s Daily for example declared: ‘In terms of Moon landing, it is our business to decide when we will send our astronauts there, and it is none of any other’s country’s business’. Meanwhile, the country’s Global Times newspaper told readers that Nelson’s ‘smearing remarks against China’s space development are yet another ridiculous and pathetic attempt to hype the “China threat” theory to get more funding, which only exposes the U.S.’s own hegemonic and colonial ambitions’.

Song Zhongping, a space analyst and TV commentator loyal to Beijing, has meanwhile launched a furious attack on NASA’s boss in the Global Times, saying: ‘Being a former astronaut himself, it is pathetic that he would play the trick of a thief crying “Stop thief”.’

With fighting talk like that, Moon Man won’t be the only lunar drama that captures China’s imagination in the months and years to come.