Opinion | China's JL-3 Missile Test Reveals the Intelligence-Gathering Hand of Multiple Nations

At 12:01 p.m. on July 6, China's state broadcaster CCTV announced — with unusual speed for a PLA operation — that the navy had test-fired a submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missile carrying a simulated warhead toward the South Pacific. Almost immediately, two incompatible accounts of the same launch emerged, and the gap between them says as much about Taiwan's intelligence posture as it does about China's missile.

​Two Stories About One Missile

Mainland experts and commentators broadly described a JL-3 fired underwater from a nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine in the Bohai Sea, arcing toward waters east of the Solomon Islands. Taiwan's national security leadership — Defense Minister Wellington Koo, National Security Council Secretary-General Joseph Wu, and the Ministry of National Defense's deputy chief of intelligence, Hsieh Jih-sheng — told a different story: a JL-2, fired from the surface, from the South China Sea, toward the South Pacific.

The timing added intrigue. The two pre-announced test corridors — one from the Bohai Sea, one from the South China Sea, both terminating in the South Pacific — were published just as the Chinese and Russian navies convened in Qingdao for their "Joint Sea-2026" exercise. I suspect the scheduling and the broader strategic choreography are connected. And on the morning of July 8, the day after the anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident — and just ahead of Typhoon Bavi's passage through airspace north of Taiwan on the 11th — the PLA's Eastern Theater Command mounted a "joint combat readiness patrol" in the seas and skies around Taiwan, drawing intense attention.

One correction to the domestic coverage is worth making at the outset. Taiwanese media reported that "US military media" had picked up Wu's disclosure. The outlet in question, USNI News, is not an official organ of the US Navy; it is the news arm of the US Naval Institute, operating as an independent nonprofit, and its news site dates to 2012. USNI News cited Wu's post on X identifying the missile as a JL-2, launched from the South China Sea, overflying the northern Philippines, and splashing down near 6°S, 174°E — between Nauru and Tonga — for a total flight distance of roughly 7,000 kilometers or more, a figure consistent with the JL-2's assessed operational range.

Consistent with range is not the same as confirmed. My working assessment has been that the July 6 shot was a JL-3, for two reasons.

First, precedent. The last comparable event was on December 22, 2019, when a Type 094 strategic submarine fired from the Bohai Sea toward an inland target range in western China. Since then, the JL-3 appeared publicly at the September 3, 2025 military parade — and Beijing's habit is to display weapons openly only once they equip operational naval units. Second, logic. If the JL-3 is already in service, re-testing the decade-old JL-2 accomplishes little. The two variants are externally near-identical, and a flight distance of roughly 7,000 kilometers — which a JL-3 can fly on a lofted or deliberately shortened profile — cannot by itself settle the question.

On July 8, Minister Koo told lawmakers that, based on intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and multiple intelligence sources, the PLA "likely" fired a JL-2, which did not pass through Taiwan's air defense identification zone. Hsieh added that the launch was "assessed to have been" conducted "on the sea surface," and that the type was "preliminarily assessed" as a JL-2 with a range of about 7,000 kilometers. Asked by legislator Wang Ting-yu whether the information came through routine intelligence exchange, Hsieh answered yes. Subsequent reporting held that Taiwan's long-range early warning radar at Leshan captured the initial launch data and shared it with intelligence partners, while the later flight path — beyond Leshan's installed viewing angles — was tracked by American radars and satellites.

I spent days puzzling over the "surface launch" claim. A ballistic missile submarine's entire strategic value lies in submerged concealment. Surfacing to fire an intercontinental missile forfeits that stealth and most of the deterrent logic — if that is really what happened, the missile hardly deserves the name Julang, "giant wave"; call it a ripple. Unless Taipei can produce satellite imagery showing a surfaced submarine in the act of launching, a more reasonable reading is that the initial observer saw the missile breach the surface — without seeing the submerged boat's launch sequence beneath it. The alternative implication of the officials' phrasing — that China has fielded some new surface-vessel launch capability, in the way it has built sea-based rocket launch platforms in recent years — is not supported by anything, but loose wording invites exactly that speculation.

The deeper problem is what the language reveals. "Likely," "assessed to be," "preliminarily" — anyone with basic military literacy, adversaries very much included, can read from those qualifiers roughly where Taiwan's joint ISR and analytical capabilities end. Officials speak with authority only when they speak with certainty; otherwise they are indistinguishable from military hobbyists. A neutral formula would have protected both credibility and sources: "We have full awareness of the PLA submarine's JL test toward the South Pacific; to protect intelligence sources, we will not disclose further details."

There is recent precedent for the cost of overclaiming. On December 17, 2025, Minister Koo told the legislature — and NSC advisory member Huang Chung-yen told the media — that the military had tracked the carrier Fujian throughout its deployment and "predicted" its return to the Shanghai shipyard. The next day, mainland military enthusiasts circulated foreign commercial satellite imagery showing the Fujian off Qingdao. The episode exposed both incomplete coverage beyond Taiwan's ADIZ and analytical shortfalls that need fixing.

Military history adds a harsher warning. In a rapid first strike, a stronger power moves first against the weaker side's command, control, communications, and intelligence. Leshan and Taiwan's distributed air and naval early-warning radars would top the first wave's target list — and whether the United States could still pass intelligence to Taiwan at that point is an open question. The remedy is mobile, backup sensing and communications platforms that can reconstitute theater-level early warning in wartime.

Chinese technical literature describes the missile-defense kill chain in detail: early-warning satellites detect the booster plume, cue strategic defense command centers, which task early-warning radars along the threat axis, which in turn hand off to forward phased-array guidance radars for intercept. Every link in that chain radiates — and radiating systems can be mapped.

On July 6, Japan's Joint Staff reported that a Chinese Y-9 electronic intelligence aircraft crossed the East China Sea to the area south of the Danjo Islands, flew southwest, loitered over waters northwest of Okinawa, turned north, and then reversed course back toward the mainland. I suspect the PLA used the missile test — with compressed notification windows, reportedly as little as 90 minutes for Japan — to jolt allied missile-defense networks into activating their long-, medium-, and short-range early-warning radars under time pressure, while collecting their electronic parameters and site dispositions through a layered effort: the Y-9 in the air, electronic reconnaissance ships at sea, and surveillance satellites overhead. If the missile really was a surface-launched JL-2 with a dummy warhead, any US or Japanese missile-defense unit that lit up its radars paid a steep price in signals intelligence for a modest threat. (Some units may, of course, have used the occasion deliberately as a live rehearsal.)

Some government-affiliated think tank scholars have argued that the PLA is trying to establish a "new normal" of intercontinental missile tests into the Pacific. That conclusion outruns the evidence. Normalization means converting an exceptional event into a regular, standing procedure. Two data points — the DF-31AG test of 2024 and this JL launch of 2026 — do not establish a pattern. Eastward-to-westward tests into China's interior, toward Mongolia or Xinjiang, can indeed be routine. West-to-east launches into the Pacific, toward the second island chain while carefully avoiding the third and the sensitive approaches to the US homeland, will more likely remain deliberately infrequent — spaced out precisely to probe the political and military reactions of surrounding states, and to exploit the complacency that sets in when adversaries wait too long between alarms.

Joint Sea-2026: A Typhoon Deadline and Three Patrol Routes

The China-Russia "Joint Sea-2026" exercise, themed on jointly countering maritime security threats, ran in three phases: force assembly (completed July 5), an in-port phase from the July 6 opening ceremony — including reciprocal ship visits on July 8 and, for the first time, a tour of training facilities at the PLA Navy Submarine Academy — and live sea training from July 9 to 11 covering submarine rescue, anti-surface strikes, and air and missile defense. Notices to mariners that I tracked closed two Yellow Sea zones: one of roughly 842 square kilometers (July 8–9) and a second of roughly 16,682 square kilometers (July 8–11), the latter clearly the main maneuver area. The exercise closed in Qingdao on the morning of July 13 — and here the weather mattered. Beijing evidently read Typhoon Bavi's track north from eastern Zhejiang toward Qingdao and wrapped up the day before the storm's July 14 arrival, immediately dispersing forces, including those assigned to the follow-on joint patrol, to sea.

Where will that patrol go? Past practice suggests three options. The first is the grand circumnavigation of Japan: out of the Yellow Sea, through the Tsushima Strait into the Sea of Japan, north through the Tsugaru or Soya Strait into the western Pacific, down Japan's eastern seaboard, and home via the Osumi or Miyako Strait — the classic demonstration route aimed at the US-Japan alliance. Japan reported on July 15 that a Russian Slava-class missile cruiser (hull 011), one of the exercise's principal Russian ships, had transited the Tsushima Strait into the Sea of Japan, though as of early July 16 Tokyo had published no further updates. Notably, the ROK-US Combined Forces Command announced a joint logistics exercise in Pohang and Hongcheon from July 13 to 16, which could complicate any pre-planned patrol track. The second option pushes through the Miyako or Bashi Channel into the Philippine Sea and east toward Guam or even Hawaii — a probe of anti-access/area-denial reach into deep ocean that would resonate directly with the JL test's forward-strike message, and should not be underestimated. The third runs north through the Kuril passages into the Bering Sea, to the edge of the US exclusive economic zone off Alaska's Aleutians — a mirror-image answer to American freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait.

Much of this iteration followed custom: China hosts in even years, the Northern Theater Command and navy led, submarine rescue is now a standing subject, and a Chinese Yuan-class boat participated — with Chinese and Russian submarines shown together publicly for the first time. The genuinely significant novelty was reporting that the two navies operated from a shared common battlefield picture during live training, simulating coordinated strikes on an incoming adversary. That implies a degree of electronic-warfare integration — and mutual accommodation between two closed cryptographic systems — that deserves close attention.

Back to July 8: Taiwan's defense ministry told media that evening that the PLA had begun a joint combat readiness patrol around Taiwan at 11:53 a.m. Oddly, as of my writing on the morning of July 16, the ministry had not posted a press release on its website — though it did post one for a July 2 patrol. What standard operating procedure governs this is unclear and untraceable.

My long-standing framework holds that PLA harassment around Taiwan responds to identifiable political triggers: visits by foreign officials of third-ranking seniority or above, heavyweight former officials with international influence, independence-related rhetoric — and, as I flagged as early as July 31, 2024, activities by international organizations Beijing deems anti-China. Joseph Wu himself, then foreign minister, told media on March 20, 2024: "If China is angry, it seems we're doing something right."

The visitor calendar this month was crowded: a seven-member Panamanian congressional delegation led by Orlando Carrasquilla, chair of the agriculture and fisheries committee (July 6–10); a cross-party Guatemalan delegation led by Congress President Luis Alberto Contreras Colíndres, greeted at Taoyuan airport by Deputy Foreign Minister Chen Ming-chi on behalf of Minister Lin Chia-lung; and US Senator Tammy Duckworth (July 6–8). On July 7, Lin received an eight-member delegation from the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), with Deputy Minister Wu Chih-chung hosting the evening banquet.

Can a causal link between the IPAC visit and PLA activity be demonstrated? Consider the sequence. On July 9 at 10 a.m., the IPAC delegation boarded a 100-ton Coast Guard Administration patrol boat at Kinmen's Shuitou pier — with a CNA reporter embarked — and sailed clockwise past the Kinmen Bridge and Kinmen's northern waters to view the impact of China's land reclamation for Xiang'an airport, docking at Liaoluo. The defense ministry's activity report released at 9:11 a.m. on July 10 shows two PLA fighter sorties operating from 10:00 to 11:55 a.m. on July 9 in airspace west of the Taiwan Strait, from south of Kinmen to south of Wuqiu — precisely bracketing the boat trip. Late on July 10, Taiwan Affairs Office spokesman Chen Binhua denounced IPAC as a ragtag band of extreme anti-China elements and called the DPP's arrangement of the Kinmen waters tour a laughable and pathetic farce doomed to fail. Expect the PLA to keep IPAC members and their Taiwan activities under close, systematic watch.

The defense ministry's July 16 report recorded, for July 15, five PLA aircraft (three crossing the median line into the central and southwestern ADIZ), seven navy vessels, and two official ships around Taiwan. The graphics show three fixed-wing and helicopter sorties along the western side of the strait from southeast of Dongyin to east of Kinmen, one of which — which I assess as an army aviation WZ-10 attack helicopter — crossed the median line south-southwest of Wuqiu; separately, a drone and what appears to be a shipborne helicopter operated in the southwestern corridor from Fujian's Dongshan toward waters far south-southwest of Eluanbi, implying at least one PLA warship of 3,000 tons or more deployed there.

Median-line helicopter activity of this kind, in past patterns, accompanies a foreign warship's strait transit, with WZ-10s flown for near-shore watch. The likelier trigger sits elsewhere: from July 10 to 14, three large Japan Coast Guard patrol vessels — reported as the Kanbai (PLH-45), Taketomi (PL-81), and Irabu (PL-95) — declined to shelter from Typhoon Bavi in Ryukyu ports and instead held a north-center-south picket along the Taiwan Strait. Days earlier, on July 9, former Japanese National Security Secretariat chief Shigeru Kitamura publicly urged Japan to strengthen Taiwan Strait deterrence within US-Japan-Taiwan trilateral cooperation, and called for joint Japan-Taiwan coast guard exercises against Chinese gray-zone operations.

Beijing, by all indications, took sharp notice and protested. The Japanese moves look like a response to China's post–May 28 buildup of maritime police, rescue, and research vessel deployments following the Japan-Philippines delimitation agreement. If that reading holds, the practical consequence is predictable: China's coast guard and navy will tighten surveillance in the waters around Taiwan, and "joint combat readiness patrols" — alongside routinized coast guard and research-vessel operations — will come at times and places of Beijing's choosing.

*The author is a research fellow at the Chinese Society of Strategic Studies.

Original Article in Chinese

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