An opinion piece by Australian writer John Birmingham published on December 17, 2013 inside the Brisbane Times offers a hint of how the landing on the Chinese Chang'e 3/Jade rabbit has been seen in countries beyond China as well as the United States.
Birmingham is aware that Chinese moon landing like a significant and largely positive development, albeit not for America's own space agency.
'Significant as it marks the arrival with the emerging Chinese superstate about the highest frontier; given it throws into sharp relief the retreat in the US from space; and given it presages a whole new realm of competition between Beijing's massive state supported space program along with the growing band of private, western firms aiming to extract value from cold rocks inside sky.'
In plain english the new space race will likely be between China plus a bevy of western manufacturers like SpaceX, Planetary Resources, and Golden Spike, amongst others. This is actually, in contrast to Birmingham's assessment, a potentially bad situation.
The reason things could turn ugly is the fact China contains the military muscle of an government to back its space ambitions. Without their particular nation state website to back them up, several commercial miners around the moon, say, could well be out of luck if China made a decision to jump their claim.
Birmingham is proper that NASA is really a captive to crazy politics. But it needs liberating unless one desires that China becomes the dominate space power about the planet, thus taking possession in the future.
Ironically Birmingham is advisable known within the United States as being the author of an trilogy of alternate history novels where the United States is destroyed by an to date unknown entity.