"Russian enterprises have been cooperating with China in space construction since the late 1950s," Yury Grigoriev, deputy technical director at the Russian space constructor RKK Energia, told AFP.

"The Chinese have used our experience, but they have not blindly copied our technology," he said.

Preparing the manned flight, scheduled for between October 15 and 17, "the Chinese respected the principle that all the technical equipment must be produced in China," said Grigoriev, responsible for the construction of manned vessels and orbital modules.

Russia offered to sell China a scale model of the Soyuz in 1995, but the Chinese only bought the landing capsule.

"Taking our landing capsule as a basis, they created their own capsule," Grigoriev said. The Chinese spacecraft is "different from the Soyuz."

Where the Soyuz orbital module -- the section manned by cosmonauts during the flight -- burns up in the atmosphere on re-entry after detaching itself from the landing capsule, the Shenzhu's orbital module can continue to fly independently and can be considered as "the predecessor of an orbiting station," he said.

The Chinese "are likely to create their own orbiting station rather than sign on for the International Space Station," he said.

The Star City training centre for cosmonauts near Moscow trained two future Chinese cosmonauts, or "taikonauts," Wu Jie and Li Jinlong, from November 1996 to November 1997, the centre's deputy director Andrei Maiboroda told AFP.

Russian Space Agency spokesman Sergei Gorbunov said that Wu and Li would be the first Chinese men in space.

"We hope everything will go fine and that China will become the third member of the "space pilots' club" after Russia and the United States, he said.

Maiboroda said that Wu had trained as a mission commander and Li as an engineer aboard simulators of the Soyuz spaceship and the Mir space station.

The Chinese studied the theory of space flight, navigation, onboard management systems and space medicine. They also had physical and survival training for extreme environments in case they land in a forest or on water, he said.

The taikonauts passed all of their exams at the center "with good marks," Mairoboda said.

The training course "enabled the Chinese to set up their own training centre" on their return, where around a dozen cosmonauts have been trained, he noted.

Between June and August 1998, a group of four Chinese doctors trained at Star City to learn about space medicine.

"Russia's role in developing the Chinese space medicine sector was considerable. Although Russian aid accelerated the process, they could have managed without it," Russian expert Igor Lisov said.

"The Soviet Union provided ballistic missiles to China in the 1950s, but Sino-Soviet relations then deteriorated and the launch of the first Chinese satellite in 1970 was a purely Chinese success," he explained.

In Beijing, an expert on the Chinese space programme, Brian Harvey, told AFP that although Russia exercised "some influence" on Beijing, China "has developed its space programme very much by itself."

Russian reporters in the Chinese capital said that Russian space officials had asked to be invited to the Shenzhu launch but were turned down.

SPACE.WIRE