At 12:01 p.m. on July 6, a Chinese ballistic missile submarine fired a single JL-series submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) that splashed down, as planned, in a designated target zone in the South Pacific near Fiji. On paper, it was one test launch. In practice, Beijing engineered a single missile to carry multiple messages — and the way Taipei and Washington responded revealed a quieter contest of psychological warfare running beneath the surface.
Taiwan's Exclusive Broke the Narrative
Beijing did its best to keep the picture blurry. Before the launch, China notified relevant countries of two possible launch areas — the Bohai Sea and the South China Sea — along with two separate debris zones. When Xinhua announced the test at 1:01 p.m., it said only that a "strategic nuclear submarine" had successfully fired an SLBM carrying a training dummy warhead into "relevant international waters of the Pacific," landing precisely in the designated area. No launch site was named.
Combined with Tokyo's immediate and forceful reaction, that vagueness led most observers to conclude the missile had been fired from the Bohai Sea, transiting outer space above South Korea and Japan — and, judging by the apparent range, that it was a JL-3.
Then Taiwan upended the story. That same afternoon, National Security Council Secretary-General Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) posted a global exclusive on social media: the missile had been launched from the South China Sea, and it was a JL-2. He attached a flight-path map. Two days later, on July 8, the Ministry of National Defense's deputy chief of intelligence, Hsieh Jih-sheng (謝日升), confirmed Wu's account before the Legislative Yuan's Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee — adding that the launch site lay in waters south of Guangdong, and dropping a further revelation: the missile was fired from the surface, not from underwater.
How Leshan Radar Settled the Launch-Site Question
On the launch location, Taipei's account is almost certainly correct, and Taiwan did not need anyone's help to establish it. The long-range early warning radar at Leshan, perched at 2,618 meters in the mountains of Hsinchu, gives Taiwan's armed forces the ability to fix the origin of a Chinese ballistic missile shortly after it climbs — likely well before Japan could.
Open sources indicate the Leshan array has three radar faces with a detection range against ballistic missiles exceeding 3,000 kilometers, reaching as far as Inner Mongolia. The July 6 launch point sat southwest of Leshan, less than 1,400 kilometers away in a straight line, and outside the radar's few limited blind zones. Once the missile rose past a certain altitude, Leshan would have tracked its approximate launch position and followed its trajectory until it flew beyond detection range. Confusing the Bohai Sea with the South China Sea was simply not possible.
Contrary to persistent rumors, and while a resident American presence at the site cannot be ruled out, the radar is operated by Taiwanese military personnel. Detected tracks are filtered and prioritized by threat level and passed via data link to the Air Force Operations Command, the missile early-warning center, and the Hengshan Command Center — and, plausibly, shared with the United States.
JL-2 or JL-3? Beijing Wants You Guessing
The second controversy is the missile type: the JL-2, with a range under 8,000 kilometers, or the JL-3, an intercontinental design credited with a 10,000–13,000 kilometer reach and multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) technology?
Beijing has cultivated the ambiguity deliberately. Xinhua never named the variant. The JL-3, though longer-ranged, is dimensionally similar to the JL-2, making the type nearly impossible to identify from the official photo of the missile breaking the surface. A PLA account on X went further, pointedly posting photos of the JL-3 and JL-2 side by side.
Operational secrecy explains part of this. But the ambiguity is also information warfare designed to magnify the test's coercive effect. Even if the missile was a JL-2, regional capitals must now ask whether it was a JL-3 — and whether the JL-3 is mature and deployed. They must also wonder about the submarine itself: an improved Type 094A, or something more advanced, perhaps a Type 096?
In tactics, a commander sometimes feigns weakness — "able, yet appearing unable" — to lure an enemy into a trap. In strategic deterrence, the logic inverts: to amplify an adversary's fear and uncertainty, one must sometimes appear more capable than one is. With nothing more than studied silence about a missile designation, Beijing extracted a larger show of force than the launch alone could deliver.
Two Launch Zones, Five Audiences
Why did Beijing plan — and pre-notify — two launch areas and two flight corridors? The first plausible answer: to let one missile register displeasure with five countries at once — the United States, Japan, the Philippines, Australia, and Fiji.
Japan and the Philippines have recently and conspicuously upgraded ties toward a "comprehensive strategic partnership," formally opening negotiations on delimiting their exclusive economic zones. Tokyo continues transferring defense equipment to Manila, including patrol frigates and radar systems, and the two sides are pushing a Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) that would allow each other's forces to deploy to their respective territory, waters, and airspace for joint exercises — a visible deepening of first-island-chain defense cooperation in support of the American effort to constrain China.
On the very day of the test, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was in Suva signing a historic "Ocean of Peace" mutual defense pact and a "Vuvale Union" treaty with Fijian Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka — widely read as a hedge against China's military and economic expansion in the South Pacific.
By officially announcing two possible trajectories in advance, Beijing pressured all five capitals with a single round.
Why Hainan, Not Bohai: The Trump Calculus
A second possibility is that the PLA had genuinely prepared launches in both the Bohai Sea and the South China Sea, leaving the Central Military Commission to decide whether to fire both, or which one — a choice perhaps made only after the notifications had gone out, ultimately falling to a submarine deployed near Hainan Island.
If so, the motive for choosing the south was likely restraint: avoiding excessive provocation of President Trump, and protecting the fragile thaw in bilateral relations achieved after the May Xi-Trump summit.
The geometry explains why. A wartime launch from the Bohai Sea would most plausibly fly a polar trajectory over the Arctic — the shortest path to the American homeland. From the Bohai Sea over the polar route, the U.S. West Coast (Seattle, San Francisco) lies roughly 8,500–9,500 kilometers away; Washington and New York, roughly 10,500–11,500 kilometers. A Bohai launch paired with implied JL-3 range would read in Washington as Xi Jinping signaling to Trump that China can strike the entire United States, capital included — a message a president in a sour mood could easily take personally.
From near Hainan on a Pacific trajectory, the math is far less menacing: Los Angeles sits 11,500–12,000 kilometers out, and Colorado or Chicago at 12,500–13,500 kilometers — the outer limit of the JL-3, and beyond any threat to the East Coast. If the missile was in fact a JL-2, a Hainan launch could at most threaten Hawaii, not the continental United States.
In short, firing from the South China Sea still rattled the cage — without rattling Trump.
Washington's Quiet Counter-Move, Delivered Through Taipei
Read the sequence of Taiwan's disclosures again, and a second psychological operation comes into focus — this one American, aimed at Beijing, and executed with precision rather than fanfare.
Leshan can fix a launch point and track a trajectory, but it cannot identify a missile's variant, and it certainly cannot determine whether a missile left the water or a surfaced hull. The Ministry of National Defense's knowledge of those details almost certainly came through intelligence exchange with the United States.
Taiwan's military is famously tight-lipped about PLA movements — it will not even say whether a Chinese carrier transited the Taiwan Strait northbound or southbound, let alone discuss intelligence-sharing arrangements. For Taipei to volunteer a global exclusive, in escalating installments, breaks that pattern so sharply that American consent — or American instigation — is hard to rule out.
Washington's purpose would be twofold: to deflate the psychological pressure the test placed on regional states, and to show the PLA that the United States can surge its intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets on short notice to watch China's coastal waters in detail. Beijing's pre-launch notification reportedly gave less than 24 hours' warning, an apparent attempt to compress American collection time. That U.S. assets nonetheless localized the probable launch site, converged on it, and captured the moment of launch — down to the fact that it came from the surface rather than underwater — is itself a deterrent message. But deterrence only works if the target knows. Which may be exactly why, on July 8 in the Legislative Yuan, the Ministry of National Defense chose to say it out loud.
*The author is an Associate Research Fellow at the Division of Defense Strategy and Resources, Institute for National Defense and Security Research.
