Commentary
The media recently reported that the Chinese regime’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is building the world’s biggest military base underground in possible preparation for conflict with the United States.
Large enough to fit 10 Pentagons, the new super large facility should not be a surprise—it is the logical next step of the Chinese regime’s long program of underground facilities. The command center is on the western outskirts of Beijing.
In about 2011, stories began to appear about China’s “Underground Great Wall.”
“In March 2008, China’s state-run CCTV network broke the news about a 5,000-kilometre-long network of hardened tunnels built to house the Chinese Second Artillery Corps’s increasingly modern force of nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles,” The Diplomat reported on Aug. 20, 2011.
Hui Zhang of Harvard’s Belfer Center downplayed Beijing’s Underground Great Wall and said it was only “defensive in nature.”
Before construction of the Underground Great Wall, the Chinese navy built a large underground submarine base on Hainan Island that is still being expanded and improved.
BulgarianMilitary.com describes the new command center in Beijing as a “command-and-control center for the PLA in wartime.“ The report states that ”the site’s sheer scale, combined with its underground elements, points to a design built for survival,“ and that ”experts believe that the complex will feature a series of underground nodes, perhaps even a hidden subway system, all interconnected by subterranean passageways.”
When completed, this facility—now dubbed the “Beijing Military City” by Western military analysts—will be the largest underground command center in the world, possibly in history.
Western Equivalents Are Limited in Comparison
Zhang has described the Beijing Military City as defensive in nature. That is one viewpoint, but the facility should also be compared to those in the West. The challenge is that there is no equivalent command center in the West in modern times.There are underground facilities dating back to the Cold War days in the West, but most have been decommissioned. Canada’s “Diefenbunker” in Ottawa is a museum and tourist attraction. In the UK, there was the Central Government War Headquarters, close to Bristol, about 100 miles west of London. It could accept about 4,000 to 5,000 essential personnel for the continuity of government.
In the United States, there was The Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia, where, at one time, Congress would relocate in case of conflict; it is now a museum with a gift shop. The Pentagon has the existing National Military Command Center, which is in the above-ground basement, but also has a backup at Raven Rock in Pennsylvania and air and ground mobile alternate command posts. The White House has an alternate facility for continuity of government, if necessary.
Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, has an underground facility that is being rebuilt because of a flood in 2019 that damaged part of the facility. The vaunted and historic Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado Springs, Colorado, was essentially closed in about 2005 but was reopened in 2015 as a backup for the above-ground facilities at Peterson Air Force Base.
Most of the Cold War facilities in the West closed because there was a perception that there was no compelling reason to keep them open and because there were enormous maintenance costs to keep them operational. The reality is that all of these Western facilities, whether they are active or museum pieces, would fill up only a small portion of the operational side of the underground Beijing Military City currently under construction.
The Chinese Regime’s New Underground Headquarters
The message being sent by Beijing’s construction is that the Chinese regime is preparing for conflict.“This isn’t just about protecting assets,” Bulgarian military expert Boyko Nikolov said. “It’s about creating a self-sustaining, impenetrable hub that could coordinate China’s war efforts from the shadows.”
Dennis Wilder, former head of the China analysis section at the CIA and senior adviser for Asia at the White House, said, “If the report is correct, it is a sign of China’s intention to build not only world-class conventional power but also advanced nuclear war fighting capabilities.”
The progression from the Hainan underground submarine base to the Underground Great Wall for the Chinese regime’s ground-based nuclear force to the Beijing Military City is likely the largest aggregation of underground military facilities in history. All signs indicate that this is part of a pathway to conflict. According to China expert Gordon Chang, “China is preparing for war, America is not.” The assessment could not be clearer or starker.
Beijing is building and expanding underground facilities as protected wartime command and control centers to ensure continuity of government. The West has similar facilities, but most have been converted into museums that would need significant modernization and time if they were to be brought back into service.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
