China to take wraps off devastating new weapon it has been hiding from the world

By Richard Ashmore, Senior News Reporter

China could be about to unveil a new deadly weapon (Image: X )

China has boasted it is about to unveil the "most powerful laser air defence system in the world".Chinese President Xi Jinping has just hosted Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin and India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a summit pledging more cooperation between the three giant nations in apparent response to tariff hikes from Washington and sanctions from Britain and Europe over the war in Ukraine.

Now Beijing is flexing its military muscles by announcing it will remove a cover from a secretive new device developed as an air defence system, which it claims is part of an arsenal of new weaponry technologically streets ahead of anything fielded by the United States or Britain. A tantalising glimpse of the hardware has been cirulating on social media, with a green tarpaulin covering a turret-like structure mounted on a large military vehicle.

Whether the claims of the authoritarian regime can be believed is up for debate, but tomorrow an altogether anti-Western axis of Vladimir Putin, North Korea's Kim Jong-Un and Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian, are expected to witness the unveiling of the new warfighting kit in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

Britain's DragonFire laser weapon has been tested by the Ministry of Defence (Image: SWNS )

According to The Telegraph, US military analysts at the Pentagon will be eager to extract as much information as possible about any new Chinese weapons are tensions mount between Washington and Beijing over the status of the island of Taiwan, which sits just 100 miles from mainland China.

Britain, the US and Western allies have pledged to support Taiwan, which is a key manufacturer of computer chips, in the event of the threat of invasion by China. Beijing has never recognised the legitimacy of Taiwanese independence and regularly carries out military drills close to its much-smaller neighbour.

New weapons which could be used in any conflict sparked between China and the West, could include laser defence systems, as well as ship-killing missiles, which may be used by Beijing to target the Royal Navy if it sails to the aid of Taiwan.

Jared Keller, author of the Laser Wars newsletter on Substack, told The Telegraph: "In terms of speed of development, [China] is definitely outpacing the US.

"But while the Chinese industrial base keeps rolling out these systems, and they get unveiled at armed shows, [there is little] visual evidence of these things in operation."

President Putin has met with China's President Xi Jinping this week (Image: Getty )

Rob Peters, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, said whenever China announces new weapons "we should be a little bit cautious that they’ve got the best stuff or they know how to use it."

The People's Liberation Army (PLA) is China's massive two-million-man-strong military force, which is the most powerful army in the world purely in terms of numbers of personnel. However, the PLA has not fought in a major war since 1979 when it suffered heavy losses during the invasion of northern Vietnam.

But Chinese-made drones have seen action in the war in Ukraine, with short-range models and long-range suicide drones both being deployed by Putin's invading Russian army.

In Britain, the Royal Navy has trialled a laser defence system dubbed Dragonfire which is reported to have downed 30 drones in 300 shots. According to the Ministry of Defence (MoD) "DragonFire exploits UK technology to be able to deliver a high power laser over long ranges. The precision required is equivalent to hitting a £1 coin from a kilometre away".

The MoD plans to equip four destroyers with the £120 million weapons by 2027.