Backed by international competitions, a 2 billion yuan industry, and complex tricks and designs, kiting in China is no child’s play
The blue-and-white space craft bearing the red five-star flag steadily docks at the space station as spectators on the ground cheer, waiting for the astronauts to eventually come out for a walk. But this wasn’t the scene from October 2021, when China’s Shenzhou-13 mission reached the Tiangong Space Station—instead, it took place on April 17, 2022, a few meters above an empty field in Weifang, Shandong province, with a spacecraft and space station constructed from bamboo and carbon fiber rods, wrapped in synthetic fiber, and completed with a miniature astronaut made of an ultralight moldable foam.
The Shenzhou-13 kite, which is eight meters long with a tail of 150 meters, took a core team of 11 artisans four iterations of design and two intensive months to build. “But it only took us one go to fly it successfully,” boasts Liu Zhijiang, a traditional kite craftsman and the mastermind behind this project, speaking with TWOC over the phone from Weifang, a city believed to be the birthplace of kites. The kite was modeled after the traditional local “dragon-head centipede-tail” kite style, while the “astronaut” was modeled after Liu himself and operated by a remote-controlled electric motor.
If it weren’t for a surge in local Covid-19 cases, this space kite’s “launch” would have also marked the beginning of the now-postponed 39th edition of the Weifang International Kite Festival, an annual fanfare that features various kite flying events and competitions, attracting tens of thousands of kite fliers and spectators from around China (and around the world before the pandemic) and choking off nearby car traffic.
The space station might be state-of-the-art, but it is hardly the most bizarre kite that has graced Weifang’s skies. Giant meters-long nylon whales and octopuses are just run-of-the-mill, next to a life-size boat decorated in rainbow colors and a name tag that says “Noah’s Ark,” and a record-breaking 7,700-meter dragon kite that took 50 people to get off the ground at the 2021 festival, according to the Weifang Evening News.
Anything Flies: How Kiting in China Reached New Heights is a story from our issue, “Lessons For Life.” To read the entire issue, become a subscriber and receive the full magazine. Alternatively, you can purchase the digital version from the App Store.
Siyi is the Culture Editor at The World of Chinese. She writes about arts, culture, and society, and is ever-curious about the minds, hearts, and souls inside all of these spheres. Before joining TWOC, she was a freelance writer with some additional work experience in independent filmmaking and the field of education.
