BEIJING — With a “kiss” more than 200 miles above Earth, a pair of Chinese spacecraft successfully coupled early Thursday morning, bringing the country one step closer to its four-decade quest for manned space exploration.

The docking of the Shenzhou 8 capsule with the Tiangong 1 module was broadcast live on national television. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao watched from the control center in Beijing, and thousands of citizens expressed their pride through Internet postings in what many referred to as the country’s first “space kiss,” remarking how far China had come since its more impoverished days.

In the coming year, officials plan to repeat the unmanned exercise with astronauts as part of its mission to reach the moon and to launch its own space station by 2020. If all goes according to plan, China’s floating laboratory would become airborne around the same time the aging International Space Station goes into retirement.

American and Russian aerospace engineers perfected space docking in the 1960s, but Wu Ping, a spokeswoman for China’s manned space program, said that Chinese scientists had come to this moment largely on their own, having domestically produced hundreds of components and instruments.