You think if the rockets don't use hypoerglic then they won't smash onto villages? Give me a break! Space X rockets also fell down on people's properties in the past. This is a launch location problem, not a rocket design problem. The grandiose idea to phase out hyperbolic is the dumb-dumb decision here. Had support for hyperbolic rockets been built at Wenchang, all of the launches from Xichang could have been moved and this debris problem could have been avoided.
Even infrastructure like the Wenchang
commercial launch site won't exist if it wasn't for China copying SpaceX. Imagine if China actually bothered to build coastal launch sites 20 years ago, instead of when they were forced to copy SpaceX. When they ignored rockets, they also ignored the launch infrastructure. There's lots of other bullshit here of course. Let's look at how accurate SpaceX is aiming their rockets for a landing, imagine if China actually perfected guiding spent rocket boosters using grid fins or parachutes onto specific spots because of their inland launch sites. Instead, China didn't give a shit and only started putting parachutes and grid fins onto spent booster stages for more controlled landings after 2016, I wonder why?
Anyway, dropping rocket boosters onto villagers is bad. Dropping toxic rocket boosters is worse. I wouldn't want to be kicked in the balls, but I would take it over being stabbed in the neck.
And I don't know what parallel universe you are from, but there was no "once in a century opportunity" for China to be a global leader in rocket technology. None whatsoever. China was bar from the international launch market, budget was tight up until the 2010's, and there were a lot of more important projects for China to catch up on.
This would be believable if the soviet union wasn't the global leader in rocket technology for decades. They were a industrial superpower, but that's really about it. They had their fair share of famines, the average pleasant was poor as fuck, the government was also poor as fuck, the government was corrupt, they were battered and bruised from WWII and they still had some of the best rocket engines around. Oh and they were also barred from the Western launch market. What excuses does 1990s-2010s China have that the soviet union during the 1950s-1980s didn't?
Again, the collapse of the soviet union and the subsequent stagnation of the American rocket industry was a once in a century opportunity for China. Don't deny facts here. How often is a "friendly" neighboring space superpower gonna crumble into pieces and allow you to copy all their technology, while the other global space superpower bumbles their way into a cancelled rocket after cancelled rocket, for 20 years straight. America literally lost access to human spaceflight for like a decade, that's how fucking bad the situation was in America was. This of course happens every year right?
There was little sense to splurge money that doesn't exist to change something that works.
And that's how you fall behind in technology. Everything works just fine in a vacuum. Bows and arrows work fine until someone sails into your country with guns and demands you join the empire. Expandable rockets work fine until a certain company comes in and starts launching more payload then the rest of the world combined 10 times over.
You're overestimating China's capabilities, especially in those early years. The industrial base was poor and lacked the tools and experience to fabricate exotic materials (really the key behind most space and military technologies), advanced rocket engines and avionics.
Explain the soviet union's lead in rocket engine then? They had the same issues that China faced, large uneducated pleasant population, very poor- both per capita and total economy wise, took a massive beating in WW1 and WW2 and even faced their own fair share of massive famines. Really, the only thing that they had going for them was them being a industrial powerhouse, almost like a certain other country.
This is 1990s China vs 1960s America and Soviet union, not 1960s China. They were designing rockets with slide rulers and pen and paper in the 60s. Basic electronics were barely a thing back then. Trying to compare the two is just embarrassing.
(a tech that has been around since the 1950s
Which makes it worse that China cannot modernise her rocket fleet even in 2024.
In the mean time you choose to be blind in what China was doing as other member has pointed out, especially worth to mention YF-100 is an engine (Oxidizer rich staged combustion) that is more technically advanced than Merlin,
Then explain how SpaceX is launching around 80 times a year while China is launching rocket equipped with the YF-100 around 4 times a year.
