China builds what America only dreamed: How Beijing beat US to a global missile defence network

The world has just seen a stunning twist in the race for missile defence technology. For years, the United States imagined itself as the country that would one day build a shield to protect humanity from nuclear attacks. It spent decades designing what it called a “space-based missile defence system” that could stop any launch anywhere on Earth. But while America kept planning, China quietly went ahead and built one.

Beijing’s new system, described as a “distributed early warning detection big data platform,” is not just a test concept. It is a real, working prototype of a global missile defence network. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) didn’t wait for global agreements or endless discussions. It built, tested, and deployed. Now, China has something that the United States only talked about: an operational missile shield.

The US once called its own vision the Golden Dome, a grand idea for a planetary defence network announced by Donald Trump in 2025. It was meant to use satellites, artificial intelligence, and space-based sensors to track and destroy incoming missiles. But even now, the project remains stuck in design meetings and budget debates. As one senior official, US Space Force General Michael Guetlein, admitted in July, nobody in Washington really knows what the final structure of the Golden Dome should look like. “Objective architecture,” he said, “is still unclear.”

Meanwhile, Chinese scientists have already moved far ahead. Li Xudong’s team at the Nanjing Research Institute of Electronics Technology, one of China’s biggest defence research centres, says their system can track up to 1,000 missiles fired at China from anywhere on Earth at the same time. It uses data from satellites, radar stations, aircraft, and naval sensors to follow every potential threat in real-time. Each missile, warhead, or decoy is tracked, identified, and analysed before it even reaches Chinese airspace.