Trump's Dream, China's Reality: Beijing Develops Planet-Wide Defence System

China has reportedly developed a first-of-its-kind missile defence system with a worldwide reach. The global defence system-- called the “distributed early warning detection big data platform”-- is similar to America's Golden Dome project proposed by President Donald Trump, according to a report by The South China Morning Post.

Per the report, the system is still in its early stages of development and can simultaneously monitor a thousand missiles fired at China from anywhere in the world.

America's Dream

The year was 1983. The United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a Cold War nuclear standoff, with round-based missile launchers and submarines pointing at each other, when then US President Ronald Reagan announced the 'Strategic Defence Initiative', nicknamed "Star Wars".

Addressing Americans on March 23, 1983, Reagan had announced, "Imagine a system that could intercept and destroy intercontinental ballistic missiles before they reach our shores. Imagine a system that could protect our cities and our people from nuclear attack."

Eight years after the historic speech, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and Reagan's vision of "Star Wars" never entered operational service.

Years later, Donald Trump took off from where Reagan left. In May 2025, Trump proposed to build a multilayered missile defence system for the United States, dubbed the 'Golden Dome' missile shield.

Estimated to cost $175 billion, the Golden Dome missile defence will include four layers -- one satellite-based and three on land -- with 11 short-range batteries located across the continental US, Alaska and Hawaii, according to a Reuters report.

China's Reality

According to the South China Morning Post report, scientists in China have deployed a working prototype of their defence system. The system reportedly uses diverse sensors in space, the ocean, the air and on the ground to identify and analyse potential threats.

It is reportedly the first missile defence system known to reach planet-wide coverage and has been developed, tested and deployed by the People's Liberation Army (PLA).

The prototype acquires critical information-- like light trajectories, weapon types and whether they are true warheads or decoys-- in real time to guide interception systems, the report said.

"The prototype system can achieve distributed parallel scheduling of up to 1,000 data processing tasks across nodes," scientists at the Nanjing Research Institute of Electronics Technology, China's largest R&D hub for defence electronic system engineering, said in a peer-reviewed paper published in the Chinese journal, Modern Radar, on September 2.

"Currently, the prototype system has been tested across multiple early warning and detection system nodes, achieving unified collection, processing, integration and analysis of fragmented, isolated and multi-format early warning and detection data.

"The resulting data products can be centrally published, significantly enhancing the comprehensive management capabilities" of the PLA headquarters, they added.

Meanwhile, the US Golden Dome programme, which aims to create an integrated, AI-enabled missile defence network spanning land, sea, air and space, is yet to establish a clear technical architecture.