FPI / August 21, 2025
By Richard Fisher
On the night of Aug. 22-23, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) held another practice run for its massive Sept. 3 military parade commemorating the 80th anniversary of “Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War.”
One revelation of particular national security concern to the United States was that of the “HQ-29,” an apparent anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system large enough to be able to target incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO).
This signals that despite decades of deceptive propaganda, especially decades of vicious criticism of American ABM programs starting with President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), China is close to deploying its own national missile defense system.
China’s anti U.S.-ABM deception goes back to 1985, when former CCP leader Deng Xiaoping told former President Richard Nixon, reported by Xinhua on Sept. 6, 1985, ” We are against whoever goes in for the development of outer space weapons.”
Based in part on interviews with Chinese strategic issue experts in 1986, the prestigious journal Problems of Communism published a groundbreaking article expanding on China opposition, “China’s Response To The Strategic Defense Initiative,” by Bonnie S. Glaser and Banning N. Garrett.
Despite the cancellation of SDI by the early 1990s, China continued its loud campaign against U.S.-Japan missile defense cooperation, and succeeded in scaring South Korea from missile defense cooperation with the U.S. until North Korea’s China-assisted missile programs forced the deployment of the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Aera Defense (THAAD) missile defenses in 2017.
What the Glaser and Garrett article did not mention, something that U.S. intelligence agencies were surely aware of, was that in the early 1963 Mao Zedong ordered his “640 Program” to develop an early Chinese national missile defense — mention of which would have exposed Deng’s and China’s missile defense hypocrisy.
At least since at least the early 1990s China has been working on its own theater and national missile defense systems, that are now coming together rapidly as the Trump Administration commits the U.S. for the first time to build its own “Golden Dome” national missile defense.
For over a decade, Chinese and other sources have mentioned the development of the HQ-19 and HQ-26 as possible future large missile interceptors.
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