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