China Builds US Warship Replica for Desert Missile
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- China built a full-scale replica of a US Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer in the Taklamakan Desert in far-western Xinjiang, visible in satellite imagery since at least June.
- Joseph Wu, co-founder of the Taiwan Defense Studies Initiative, first identified the destroyer mock-up at the Ruoqiang test range.
- Debris from prior missile strikes surrounds earlier mock-ups at the Ruoqiang site, which analysts have identified as a location for anti-ship ballistic missile testing.
- This is China's latest in a series — satellite images from 2021 depicted an aircraft carrier and two Arleigh Burke-class destroyers at the same testing range, per the US Naval Institute.
- China also erected replicas of central Taipei — including the Presidential Office Building, Judicial Yuan, and Foreign Ministry — at its Zhurihe training base in Inner Mongolia, with construction at a second Alxa League site starting around October 2025.
- A Bloomberg analysis of China's missile-making ecosystem found Beijing ramped up missile production in 2025 by the most since Xi Jinping became president in 2013.
Why it matters: The Ruoqiang site already hosts anti-ship ballistic missile tests, with debris from strikes visible around past mock-ups. The replicated Arleigh Burke-class destroyers are the same class operated by the US Seventh Fleet in the Western Pacific, and Bloomberg found China's missile production ramped up the most since Xi Jinping took power in 2013 — meaning Beijing is iterating on real kill-chain data against the warships it would face near Taiwan.
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