China’s communists to its citizens “Nice business you got here.
Shame if something happened to it.”

As I predicted when China announced in the fall 2025 that it was creating a special agency to supervise the pseudo-companies in its faux commercial space industry, the Chinese government last week announced the release of what it calls its “Commercial spaceflight standards system,” covering all aspects of the operations its pseudo-private companies.

The standards cover six different areas, but the first best expresses the government’s overall goal:

‘Industry Governance Standards’ focuses on the sector’s characteristics of rapid development, agile response, and short delivery times, alongside space safety concerns such as debris mitigation and protection. With subcategories including market access, safety supervision, space environment governance, certification, energy conservation, and occupational health, it is intended to establish hard regulatory constraints as the compliance foundation for orderly commercial space development. [emphasis mine]

The screen capture from a Monty Python skit to the right says it all. The communists running China apparently did not like the chaotic free nature of this pseudo-industry, with the different companies coming up with many wild and innovative ideas, some of which were bound to fail. The communists also saw that some of these pseudo-companies were also making a lot of money that the communists weren’t getting.

And so, the government formed this agency, and it called the companies together to lay down the law.

In the lead-up to the launch of the standards system, China National Space Administration Administrator Shan Zhongde, who has been in the role for sixteen months, held a roundtable meeting with the heads of fourteen commercial space enterprises to discuss many aspects of the sector, including issues facing business operations. Who was at the meeting wasn’t shared, only revealing that they were launch vehicle operators, satellite builders, constellation managers, and spacecraft communication firms.

It appears this new regulatory control was encouraged by China’s leader himself, Xi Jinping, who in two different speeches recently called for a “standardization of systems and shared use of existing facilities.”

Standardization can be a good thing. I suspect however that a lot of this has nothing to do with the kind of standardization that western companies sometimes get together to negotiate, such as electric and computer plug designs or docking ports on spacecraft. Instead, it is the typical and inevitable result of China having a top-down society ruled by dictators. Even if those rulers dole out a little freedom, sooner or later they get jealous of the success of that freedom, and use their power to take back control.

These new rules might be beneficial to China’s space effort in the short run, but I predict in the long run the rules will act to squelch innovation and competition. Expect many of these pseudo-companies to be absorbed by the government in the next few years.

Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.