Did China put on a show of its Starry Sky-2 hypersonic vehicle just to impress the US?
As Beijing wrestles with a trade war and rising tensions over Taiwan and the South China Sea, public announcement was probably intended as a rallying call, observers say
Strategic competition with the United States is pushing China to speed up the development of new hypersonic vehicles and driving its desire to showcase its achievements in the field, observers said.
With Washington and Beijing locked in a trade war, and tensions rising over Taiwan and the South China Sea, the announcement might well have been intended as a rallying call, according to an academic who specialises in security issues.
“The Chinese probably need a boost of morale and increase of strategic confidence as the relationship with the US is hitting a wall,” said Zhao Tong, a fellow with the nuclear policy programme at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Centre for Global Policy in Beijing.
“Russia also has been publicising their hypersonic missiles,” he said.
China’s defence ministry has been testing hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs), capable of flying at more than five times the speed of sound (Mach 5) since 2014, but has never provided any details.