Kina med skremmende varsel - Tyler Rogoway

China's Largest Base Has Replicas Of Taiwan's Presidential Building, Eiffel Tower

 

has made massive investments in modernizing its military over the better part of the past three decades and has established new and improved research and development and training bases to support those efforts. The People's Liberation Army has fully embraced the idea of utilizing highly realistic facilities to prepare its forces for the sorts of environments they'd be likely to fight in during future conflicts, drawing significant lessons from the experiences of the U.S. military and those of its allies. The Zhurihe Training Base in remote Inner Mongolia is the largest of these sites and notably features a huge full-size mockup a portion of downtown Taipei, the capital of the island of Taiwan, including highly elaborate recreations of its Presidential Office Building and Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There's also a cloverleaf highway interchange, a mock airfield and, bizarrely, a replica of France's Eiffel Tower.

Zhurihe, also known as the Zhurihe Combined Tactics Training Base, is China's largest training base by physical size. Observers have compared it, together with its adjacent training ranges, to the U.S. Army's Fort Irwin in southern California and that base's associated sprawling National Training Center (NTC). The NTC is home to a large number of diverse facilities that also give the Army room to conduct large scale unit exercises covering a wide variety of combat scenarios. As with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment at the NTC, Zhurihe also has its own dedicated units to play the role of enemy forces during drills. These are known as the "Blue Army," a play on the Western term "Red Force" to refer to Opposing Forces during exercises.

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The People's Liberation Army (PLA) first established Zhurihe in 1957, primarily as a tank training base. Four decades later, Chinese authorities decided to transform it into a multi-functional "first-class" facility that would prepare its forces for "hi-tech battles” of the future. 

China's military leaders had closely watched the U.S. military lightning victory over Iraq during the First Gulf War in 1991 and already started to question the adequacy of the equipping and training of their own units. In 1996, then-U.S. President Bill Clinton’s sent a pair of carrier strike groups to sail through the Taiwan Strait in response to a major crisis between authorities in Beijing and on the island, which is seen as a critical event that contributed to China's subsequent decision to initiate a massive military modernization effort across the board, which included the expansion of Zhurihe.

By the mid-2000s, Zhurihe's facilities had significantly expanded in size and scope, with a heavy emphasis on features that would be used to prepare forces for what the U.S. military calls Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT). By the end of 2014, it had further grown to include the Taiwan-related structures, as well as other features to support larger exercises, including an associated operational air base with a more than 9,000-foot-long runway to the northwest and a huge railhead to allow the rapid movement of vehicles, heavy weapons, other equipment, and personnel to and from the site. All of this is visible in high-resolution satellite imagery of the area that The War Zone recently obtained.

You can view the full high-resolution satellite images that The War Zone obtained by clicking here. The one below has been downsized to give an overview of the base for this article.