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People's Liberation Army

The People's Liberation Army is China's unified military force, encompassing army, navy, air force, and missile units under Communist Party control.

Known aliases

  • Chinese military

Current stories

leadershipOne report1 publisher

LandSpace becomes the first Chinese firm to recover a rocket booster on land

LandSpace recovered a rocket booster on land on August 19, the first time a Chinese firm has done so. Foreign Affairs puts Chinese company launches at 92 a year, up from 39 in 2020, against a US that still flies more than twice as many.

Reality

Evidence50
Adoption35
Hype gap+25
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence45
investConfirmed3 publishers

Chinese armour trained under Russia's Ukraine-derived drone tactics at Tsentr-2026

China's Central Theater Command sent Type 99A tanks and drone units to Tsentr-2026, a Russian drill of more than 47,000 personnel built on Ukraine war lessons. For China-Russia risk pricing, what Beijing's units take home from those lessons matters more than the size of the drill.

Perspective Coverage

3 publishers
Builder
Builder 27%
Operator
Operator 42%
Investor
Investor 31%

Reality

Evidence60
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+20
Incentives70
Confidence60
productOne report1 publisher

China's PLA opens colleges to train officers and technicians for drones and AI

China's PLA opened four new colleges on September 30, one of them teaching drones, autonomous systems and AI-assisted decision-making. The schools around it suggest Beijing now treats unmanned systems as a permanent staffing need inside the army.

Reality

Evidence35
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+20
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence40
investOne report1 publisher

Xi brings Beijing's March 'strike' wording on Taiwan independence into his National Day speech

Xi Jinping vowed on Sept. 30 to 'resolutely strike' Taiwan independence forces, hardening the 'oppose' he used at last year's National Day reception. Beijing's work report adopted the same verb in March, so for anyone pricing Taiwan or China risk the speech confirms a six-month-old formula.

Publishers:en.sedaily.com

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+20
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence50
securityConfirmed7 publishers

DOJ seizes QScan and QTRouter: somebody else's camera was the return address

Justice says Chinese state operators laundered intrusions through infected routers and cameras in more than 130 countries since 2018. Source geography has been unreliable for years.

Perspective Coverage

7 publishers
Builder
Builder 32%
Operator
Operator 54%
Investor
Investor 14%

Reality

Evidence66
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+18
Incentives58
Confidence64
productOne report1 publisher

China's internet regulator questions DeepSeek and Moonshot staff over data Anthropic may have received

The Information reports that the Cyberspace Administration has questioned staff at both labs after Anthropic named seven Chinese companies for relaying customer requests through Claude. No penalty has been decided.

Publishers:thenextweb.com

Reality

Evidence52
Adoption42
Hype gap+8
Incentives72
Confidence55
productOne report1 publisher

AVIC shows a fighter laser aiming system under 838 pounds beside an image of the J-36

An AVIC institute put a weight and a partly masked power figure on its fighter laser display in Beijing. The display masked the dynamic tracking accuracy, the figure that tells you whether the beam holds on a maneuvering missile.

Reality

Evidence38
Adoption14
Hype gap+42
Incentives66
Confidence45
leadershipOne report1 publisher

Investigations of the PLA's top two officers follow a process the party has run for a century

A Foreign Affairs essay counts three dozen generals formally purged since 2022 and argues the discipline strengthens the party. The problem it says the method cannot fix is succession, and Xi has named no one.

Reality

Evidence45
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+18
Incentives40
Confidence50
securityOne report1 publisher

US officials say private Chinese firms were enlisted to process data stolen from Americans

Foreign Policy's account, built on interviews with more than three dozen current and former US officials, puts the intelligence value of thefts like the 2017 Equifax breach in the analytic work that came after. No contractor is named.

Publishers:foreignpolicy.com

Reality

Evidence45
Adoption22
Hype gap+30
Incentives60
Confidence52
leadershipOne report1 publisher

Taiwan's war game moved the front line to a Taipei intersection a mile from the presidential office

The Han Kuang exercise closed with mines and barricades at a city crossroads, not on a beach. Anyone modelling Taiwan risk as a blockade should note whose assumptions changed.

Reality

Evidence64
Adoption72
Hype gap+15
Incentives58
Confidence66
securityOne report1 publisher

A Chinese state contractor rented its concealment from a commercial consumer proxy service

DOJ seized three domains on 26 August 2026 and disabled the QScan and QTRouter platforms. Both were sold as services to MSS and PLA customers, and the only telemetry that ever saw the traffic sat on the backbone.

Publishers:zerotracelab.com

Reality

Evidence74
Adoption71
Hype gap+12
Incentives62
Confidence63
leadershipOne report1 publisher

Taiwan's war rehearsal reached the streets of Taipei by night six

The defence ministry would not say what it was testing, so the ground it chose becomes the record: an airport approach road, a subway ride to a fallback headquarters, and what that implies about the fight Taipei expects to have.

Reality

Evidence52
Adoption64
Hype gap−8
Incentives58
Confidence55
productOne report1 publisher

DOJ takedown puts hijacked cameras and routers on the critical-path asset inventory

A court order killed two Chinese contractor hacking platforms because their command domains were hard-coded into the malware. The pivot hardware they infected is still nobody's asset.

Publishers:pcmag.com

Reality

Evidence68
Adoption71
Hype gap+14
Incentives62
Confidence60
productOne report1 publisher

DOJ names China's proxy quartermaster; the seizure took domains, not devices

Prosecutors say a Nanjing contractor rented IoT botnets and commercial proxies to the MSS and PLA from 2018. No individuals were charged, and the conscripted hardware stays conscripted.

Publishers:wired.com

Reality

Evidence58
Adoption47
Hype gap+24
Incentives62
Confidence61
buildOne report1 publisher

Your $1,600 robot dog has a DEVCOM lineage, and that is now a procurement question

Reuters reports that Unitree's Go2 descends from openly published, US military-funded locomotion work. Anyone buying legged robots now inherits that dual-use history.

Publishers:mezha.net

Reality

Evidence58
Adoption76
Hype gap+15
Incentives62
Confidence55