China’s Golden Dome: China has made a new missile defence system that can watch and stop attacks from anywhere in the world. Reports say the system is called the “distributed early warning detection big data platform.”
It is the first of its kind and can follow up to 1,000 missiles fired toward China from across the globe at the same time. According to The South China Morning Post, the project is still being developed but is already working as part of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) advanced defence research. The system has been compared to the United States’ “Golden Dome” idea once introduced by former President Donald Trump.
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America’s Old Defence dream
This new Chinese project reminds people of America’s past missile defence plans. In 1983, US President Ronald Reagan spoke to the country about a plan called the “Strategic Defence Initiative,” also known as “Star Wars.” It was during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Reagan said, “Imagine a system that could intercept and destroy intercontinental ballistic missiles before they reach our shores. Imagine a system that could protect our cities and our people from nuclear attack.”
Reagan’s idea never became real before the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991. But many years later, Donald Trump brought the idea back. In May 2025, Trump announced a $175 billion defence plan called the “Golden Dome.” It was said to have four layers of protection one in space and three on land with defence batteries placed across the US, Alaska, and Hawaii, according to Reuters.
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China’s Defence Reach
The South China Morning Post reported that China’s scientists have already built a working model of this new global system. It uses a wide network of sensors in space, the sea, the air, and on land to watch for possible missile threats in real time.
This makes it the first known system in the world to cover the whole planet. It can find out details like the path of light, the kind of weapon, and if an object is a real warhead or just a decoy. This helps in guiding interception systems quickly and more correctly.
The system was built and tested by the PLA with help from the Nanjing Research Institute of Electronics Technology, which is China’s biggest centre for defence electronics.
The scientists there wrote in a paper published in the Chinese journal Modern Radar on September 2, “The prototype system can achieve distributed parallel scheduling of up to 1,000 data processing tasks across nodes. Currently, the prototype system has been tested across multiple early warning and detection system nodes, achieving unified collection, processing, integration and analysis of fragmented, isolated and multi-format early warning and detection data.”
