Blinded by Empire: How a Chinese Laser Shook the Myth of Starlink Supremacy

Weaponizing Optics: How Empire Turned a Scientific Milestone into a Missile Narrative

On June 24, 2025, MSN News syndicated an article from Daily Galaxy with a sensational headline: “China Strikes Hard: Chinese Satellite Pulverizes Starlink.” According to the piece, a Chinese satellite had “blinded” a Starlink system with a 2-watt laser fired from geostationary orbit—an act framed as a major escalation in space-based warfare. But beneath the shock-language and Cold War framing, the actual event was a scientific experiment in satellite communication. There was no attack. No damage. No military engagement. Just another act of technical achievement reframed into a geopolitical provocation by a media ecosystem built to manufacture fear.

The authors of the piece remain anonymous—as is typical of wire-style corporate media—but their function is unmistakable: to provide ideological cover for the imperial state and its tech-capital partners. These are not journalists in pursuit of truth. They are copywriters for empire, operating within the discursive parameters set by military contractors, tech oligarchs, and editorial algorithms. Their career survival depends on their ability to inject alarmism into complexity, and to frame non-aligned advancements as threats to Western order. The outlet, Daily Galaxy, is less a publication than a hype machine for U.S.-aligned techno-futurism—selectively elevating Pentagon-funded “innovation” while painting parallel developments in the Global South as destabilizing or dangerous.

The piece was quickly echoed by amplifiers like Business Today, Newsweek, and South China Morning Post, whose role in the global media supply chain is to lend perceived legitimacy to the core narrative. Figures like Elon Musk, the Pentagon, and associated defense tech actors benefit materially and ideologically from this distortion, as it shields their militarized infrastructure from scrutiny while stoking public support for further orbital militarization.

The propaganda techniques employed are textbook. First, the militarized language: verbs like “strikes,” “pulverizes,” and “blinds” are loaded terms with no scientific basis. They transform a peaceful data transmission into an act of war. Second, the omission of context: no mention is made of the experiment’s scientific goals, the lack of any physical impact on Starlink, or the controlled nature of the transmission. This silence is strategic—it allows the reader to fill in the blanks with fear. Third, the narrative deploys false equivalence: because lasers can have military applications, all laser technology developed by China is painted as inherently aggressive. No distinction is drawn between civilian research and weaponry.

Fourth, the article leans heavily on Orientalist tropes. Chinese scientists are rendered anonymous and opaque. Their work is framed not as innovation, but as stealth or subversion. The implication is clear: when China builds, it builds to threaten. Finally, the piece sanitizes the role of Starlink itself—presenting it as a neutral communications system under siege rather than the privatized military infrastructure that it is. Starlink’s centrality to U.S. battlefield coordination, surveillance architecture, and foreign policy enforcement is completely erased. The reader is left with a cartoon narrative: the peaceful West, minding its orbital business, suddenly “blinded” by an aggressive Eastern adversary.

What this article performs is not analysis—it is cognitive warfare. It reorients the reader’s perception away from material reality and toward imperial fantasy. It doesn’t lie outright—it selects, frames, and omits. It invokes fear where there is no threat, and loyalty where there should be skepticism. And in doing so, it prepares the ideological ground for further escalation, further surveillance, and further privatization of the planetary commons.

What They Won’t Say Out Loud: Facts, Omissions, and the Orbital Double Standard

Strip away the headline histrionics, and the material facts of the article are relatively straightforward. Chinese scientists, led by Professor Wu Jian of Peking University and Liu Chao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, successfully transmitted data from a geostationary satellite—located 36,000 kilometers above Earth—using a 2-watt laser. This laser, roughly the brightness of a candle, was able to push data at speeds of 1 Gbps, significantly faster than the few megabits per second typically achieved by SpaceX’s low-orbit Starlink system. The success came from their use of a novel technique called AO‑MDR synergy—Adaptive Optics paired with Mode Diversity Reception—which allowed them to correct for the atmospheric turbulence that normally garbles laser signals. According to the research summary published by Interesting Engineering, the team achieved a 91% rate of usable signal integrity. This wasn’t a military test. It wasn’t conducted in space combat conditions. It was a scientific proof‑of‑concept aimed at improving data transfer methods between Earth and space.

But these crucial facts were buried beneath alarmist rhetoric, or worse, omitted entirely. The article does not mention that this was a research transmission—not a targeting mechanism, not a hostile beam, and certainly not a “blinding” weapon. It does not say that the satellite used in this experiment was publicly registered and part of China’s scientific development program, not a covert military platform. Nor does it note that the signal was sent to a fixed telescope under controlled environmental conditions, not to a mobile constellation like Starlink. There was no interference with any operational satellite, let alone Starlink itself. Yet none of that seems to matter when the goal is narrative dominance.

What’s also missing—by design—is the structural role Starlink plays in global imperial strategy. The article treats it as a passive object in space, as if it were no more significant than a weather balloon. But Starlink is not just an internet service. It is a military‑grade communications platform, deployed in warzones like Ukraine and integrated directly into NATO’s strategic operations. It functions as a digital backbone for U.S. drone warfare, battlefield logistics, and global surveillance. Starlink’s militarization was not accidental—it was planned. SpaceX secured a Department of Defense contract to supply Starlink to Ukraine to support secure tactical communications. The Pentagon has relied on Starlink not just for bandwidth, but for warfighting interoperability. In fact, even as the U.S. Air Force and Space Force pursue parallel systems, they continue to fund Starlink to supplement and fuse with command‑and‑control systems.

And it’s not just the U.S. military that’s buying in. Starlink’s expansion into the Gulf underpinned a deal with Saudi Arabia that links it directly to repressive state infrastructure. Musk’s personal visit to Riyadh in 2024 laid the groundwork for Starlink’s deployment across the kingdom, providing the backbone for surveillance systems marketed as “smart governance.” As previously reported in Weaponized Information, Starlink’s function in Saudi Arabia is not benign connectivity—it’s orbital repression. The same infrastructure guiding drones in Ukraine now provides the framework for internal policing and political control in petro‑dictatorships.

The idea that China would need to “blind” Starlink to challenge it is absurd—Starlink blinds itself to the truth of its own function: privatized imperial infrastructure. What this article conceals is that Starlink itself represents a global chokepoint in low Earth orbit, a monopoly node through which U.S. and NATO‑aligned forces can dominate communications, target dissidents, and manage battlefield operations. It is the orbital equivalent of SWIFT—financial exclusion from above, enforced not with guns but with signal control. The narrative of victimhood collapses under its own weight when examined through this structural lens.

There is also no mention of the glaring asymmetry in the technological theater. Starlink currently operates over 7,600 satellites across 140+ countries as of June 2025, alongside recent approvals for maritime and aviation use in Saudi Arabia, reinforcing corporate-military reach 1. China’s efforts in this domain are nascent by comparison. The AO‑MDR breakthrough is one of many ongoing attempts to leapfrog decades of exclusion from Western‑dominated satellite and communications regimes. China, like many nations in the Global South, has been systematically shut out of GPS, SWIFT, and undersea internet cable networks. Its turn to sovereign satellite architecture is not an act of aggression—it is an act of necessity, of
anti‑imperialist sovereignty asserting itself against digital colonialism.

And this isn’t happening in a vacuum. China’s expanding space collaboration includes partnerships with Nicaragua, which signed on to join China’s International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) moon‑base program in 2024, and Venezuela, whose scientists are being trained through China’s international satellite education platform while building regional launch capacity. These efforts are not subversive—they are sovereign. They offer an alternative to the colonial infrastructure of Western telecom monopolies and data‑mining empires. They open the door to a future where the Global South is not just a market for Western bandwidth, but a builder of its own orbital architecture.

When placed within the broader historical and material context, this laser experiment reveals the structural dynamics of a decaying empire facing technological displacement. The U.S.‑led unipolar order depends on controlling the infrastructure of information: who gets to speak, who gets to see, and who gets to transmit. That control has shifted from radio towers and fiber optics to satellites and orbital platforms. And Starlink is its crown jewel—a chokepoint in low Earth orbit disguised as a broadband service. The moment another actor demonstrates that it can route around that chokepoint, the panic sets in. Not because the empire has been attacked, but because its monopoly has been challenged.

This is the context deliberately excised from the article. There is no mention of China’s BRICS+ alliances, or its commitment to multipolar infrastructure. No acknowledgment that this technological breakthrough could enable nations across Africa, Asia, and Latin America to bypass Western surveillance networks altogether. No recognition that the Global South might want—and need—its own orbital communications systems to resist cyberwarfare, sanctions enforcement, and financial isolation. The narrative omits all of this because to include it would require admitting that Chinese innovation serves a global demand for sovereignty—not domination.

Losing Orbital Profit and Power

What the imperial media calls a “space escalation” is not about lasers or war—it’s about capitalist monopoly and imperial profit. Starlink isn’t a passive internet service; it’s a weaponized infrastructure designed to dominate markets, warzones, and data pipelines. In 2023, SpaceX secured a $23 million Pentagon contract through the Department of Defense’s PEO Digital to deploy Starlink services in Ukraine. That same year, the U.S. Navy confirmed it was evaluating Starlink terminals on destroyers, signaling their transformation into frontline command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) nodes. Meanwhile, the Pentagon expanded secure Starshield lines to nearly 3,000 Ukrainian terminals, effectively privatizing strategic communications. The profit and control flow upward; the network’s expansion is not about “freedom”—it’s about dominance and dollar signs.

The emperor’s outrage is ideological camouflage for economic panic. Starlink operates over 7,560 active satellites today, with approval to launch more than 34,000 more, creating a corporate chokehold on low-Earth orbit. Its infrastructure extends from battlefield drones to Gulf authoritarianism, yet the media portrays it as neutral. Contrast that with the U.S. military’s own optical comms program. Under DARPA’s Space‑BACN initiative, contractors like Mynaric are building inter-satellite laser systems to enable “resilient warfighter networks” and rapid interoperability. NASA’s LCRD and DSOC projects already deploy laser downlinks to support deep-space missions. When the West militarizes orbit, it’s called innovation. When China tests a candle-powered laser in a controlled lab environment, it’s called provocation.

This is not a battle of lasers—it’s a battle for the future of space infrastructure. Starlink is turning orbit into a marketplace—with state-backed control, licensing fees, and private profits—not a commons. China’s AO-MDR experiment doesn’t challenge Western military dominance overnight—but it challenges the monopoly mindset. It signals that communication architectures can be public, open, and multipolar. That scares the empire more than any missile test.

For Global South nations locked out of SWIFT, undersea cables, or U.S.-controlled cloud systems, this experiment offers more than science—it offers hope. A China-led cooperative approach to space tech could undercut Western surveillance chokepoints and build networks anchored in socialist solidarity, not exploitation. This isn’t “escalation.” It’s a quiet technological emancipation. And that is what terrifies the ruling bloc: not lasers—but liberation.

Break the Signal, Build the Future: Delinking from Empire’s Orbital Chains

The lesson is clear: empire’s control over space is not a law of nature—it is a political project upheld by private monopolies, military contracts, and propaganda masquerading as news. The Chinese laser experiment didn’t disrupt Starlink—it disrupted the mythology that imperial infrastructure is inevitable, untouchable, and universal. And that disruption matters not just in Beijing or Caracas, but in Berlin, Chicago, London, and Oakland—where workers, students, and organizers are waking up under the shadow of satellites they neither control nor consent to.

For revolutionaries and anti-imperialists in the imperial core, this is not a moment to spectate—it’s a moment to intervene. The orbital battlefield is only one front in the global class war, but it is a critical one. Starlink is not just in the sky—it’s in our schools, our factories, our disaster zones, our protest spaces. It is the uninvited guest on every device. We are living beneath a digital dome built not for access, but for asset extraction, surveillance, and suppression. And we must begin treating it as such—organizing not just around wages and healthcare, but around signal, code, and infrastructure.

That means tactical action. First, we must expose Starlink and its kindred networks—Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure—as extensions of the U.S. national security state and its transnational capitalist partners. Use people’s lived experiences—lost data, blocked access, banned voices—to build political education campaigns that name the enemy and map the system. Make it plain that these are not neutral platforms. They are weaponized technologies embedded in counterinsurgency doctrine.

Second, we must fight their expansion. Block municipal Starlink installations in your cities. Demand that local governments and unions sever contracts with imperial cloud providers. Pressure universities, especially technical schools, to reject DARPA and Pentagon research partnerships under the banner of academic freedom and scientific sovereignty. Build opposition coalitions that unite environmentalists, tech workers, Indigenous land defenders, and community organizers around a shared demand: no more sky cages. No more imperial infrastructure in our name.

Third, we must build our own networks—imperfect, under-resourced, but ours. Mesh networks, community broadband, open-source satellite tracking tools, encrypted grassroots communication platforms. Support co-ops and hacker collectives already laying the groundwork. Pair tech with land, fiber with food, routers with resistance. Institutions of dual and contending power are not dreams of the future—they are already being born in the cracks of this decaying empire. Our task is to find them, nurture them, and connect them.

Finally, we must internationalize. Let the multipolar world know that there are comrades in the belly of the beast fighting to dismantle technofascist dominance from within. Send statements of solidarity to anti-imperialist governments building sovereign digital infrastructure. Offer translation, technical labor, code, signal boosts, defensive cyber tools. Participate in international forums on information sovereignty. Forge clandestine, practical alliances that bypass imperial filters and data gatekeepers.

Empire wants us atomized, online but alone, connected to the cloud but disconnected from power. Our job is to rupture that logic—materially and ideologically. Because the future is not something we will download from Musk’s satellites. It is something we will build from the ground up, in the streets, on the picket lines, through firewalled servers and mutual aid routers, together. And when we do, we won’t need permission. We’ll just need each other.