Unidentified structures spotted by satellites on the borders of Xinjiang and Gansu Province, China, and posted on the Google Earth Internet service recently are giving rise to speculation about possible military activity, reports say.
The vast structures, all situated in parts of the Gobi used by China for its military, nuclear and space programs, have puzzled analysts. The imagery also leaves unanswered questions over whether the structures are dug in or painted.
Some of the sites observed are situated less than 160km from Jiuquan, where China’s space program and its launchpads are located. The Ding Xin military airbase, where China is believed to conduct classified aircraft tests, is 640km from some of the sites.
One picture taken in 2007 shows an aggregate of orange blocks the size of shipping containers arranged in a circle, with three military aircraft occupying the center. A more recent satellite sweep of the area shows the blocks scattered as far as 4.8km from the site.
Another image shows a series of metallic squares littered with what appears to be the debris of exploded vehicles, lending credibility to claims that some of the structures are used for gunnery or airstrike practice. Other structures consist of kilometers-long grids. With the Lop Nur nuclear test site located about 600km away from some of the structures, some experts have suggested the latter could be optical test ranges for missiles simulating the street grids of cities, with some speculating that this could be a replica of a Washington street layout. Others posit that the grids could be used for satellite calibration.
A defense expert at Jane’s Defence Weekly told the Telegraph that the structures looked similar to the kind of missile test ranges seen in the US, with target and instrumentation used to analyze the effect of missile blasts.
Beijing has yet to comment on the purpose of the structures.
LOST AT SEA: Survivors of a sunken Cambodian ship said they floated for two days in open waters, while a UN official said that traffickers might continue undeterred Chinese survivors from a boat that sank near a Cambodian island, killing three people and leaving eight missing, said they embarked on what they believed would be a short-term fishing job and ended up without food and water aboard the vessel, and their belongings were taken away. Cambodian authorities said on Friday they rescued 21 people one day after the boat small wooden fishing vessel sank near Koh Tang, a Cambodian island close to the maritime border with Vietnam. Nine more people were rescued by the Vietnamese and three bodies were recovered by Cambodia, leaving eight people still missing, Preah Sihanouk provincial
TACIT APPROVAL: While the mainland sticks to its ‘zero COVID’ policy, the Chinese leadership appears to back Hong Kong’s shift to home health monitoring Hong Kong wants to ease COVID-19 rules like mandatory hotel quarantine that have made travel difficult for nearly three years, Chief Executive John Lee (李家超) said yesterday, as mainland Chinese officials signaled their approval. The number of infections in Hong Kong has fallen to about 6,000 a day, creating room to reconsider the measures that have crimped the territory’s competitiveness, Lee told reporters at a weekly briefing. Hotel quarantine will be replaced with seven days of home health monitoring, the South China Morning Post reported, though it said the change would not be announced until all the details have been determined. The
UNREST: Images posted online showed women removing their headscarves in defiance of religious law, with some even setting them on fire or symbolically cutting their hair Protests spread to 15 cities across Iran overnight over the death of Mahsa Amini after her arrest by the country’s “morality police,” state media reported yesterday, adding that four police officers were injured and one “police assistant” died from injuries on Tuesday in the southern city of Shiraz. In the fifth night of street rallies, police used tear gas and made arrests to disperse crowds of up to 1,000 people, the official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) said. Demonstrators blockaded streets, hurled stones at security forces, set fire to police vehicles and garbage bins, and chanted anti-government slogans, it added. “On Tuesday evening,
Ukraine is now deploying captured Russian tanks to solidify its gains in the northeast amid an ongoing counteroffensive, a Washington-based think tank said yesterday, as Kyiv vowed to push further into territories occupied by Moscow. The Institute for the Study of War, citing a Russian claim, said that Ukraine had been using left-behind Russian T-72 tanks as it tries to push into the Russian-occupied region of Luhansk. “The initial panic of the counteroffensive led Russian troops to abandon higher-quality equipment in working order, rather than the more damaged equipment left behind by Russian forces retreating from Kyiv in April, further indicating
RSS