Hypersonic: Chinese researcher defected

The incident is said to have taken place in the second half of 2021, but has only just come to light: An alleged 30-year-old Chinese rocket scientist and his family fled to the USA with the help of Western services. He is said to have worked for the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) and to have been involved in or with his team in the development of the DF-17 hypersonic glide vehicle rocket carrier combo. The system caused a sensation last summer caused an international sensation last summer with a “round-the-world flight”. Various British and defense media report, citing unnamed sourcesthat the scientist contacted a British intelligence officer in Hong Kong in September 2021 and, in a first tentative approach, said that he was willing to provide detailed information about the Chinese hypersonic gliding vehicle system in exchange for asylum for himself, his wife and his child. He was aware that he would face a firing squad if he were discovered. Just because of skipped promotions? The agent immediately contacted the British secret service MI6, which – in view of the new arms race for hypersonic weapons and the alleged “lagging behind” of the USA and the West in this regard – also informed the CIA. A team of five (three from MI6 and two from the CIA) were sent to assess the value of the defector and possibly arrange safe passage for the scientist and his family to the US. A plan was devised whereby the three individuals would travel to Hong Kong via a specially designed route. Once there, the scientist would be taken to a “safe house” where he would be questioned. As there was, of course, the possibility that the man could have been “sent” by Chinese services, a dialog described as a “cat-and-mouse game” developed over the days, in which the scientist’s credentials were worked out and sounded out. During this process, the technician allegedly stated that his defection had no political-ideological or conscientious reasons, but that he had been passed over for promotion several times. He is said to have once studied in England and to be an avid cricket fan. In any case, he was able to provide selected details about China’s hypersonic development as well as technical data. He was then apparently given the green light to fly him and his family to a US Air Force base in Germany and then to the USA via the UK.

One of the sources quoted by Express.co.uk said: “He was extremely cooperative. This is an intelligent man who has played a key role in the development of hypersonic weapons in China. This is a man who follows cricket championships, prefers Jack Daniels to lager and feels hurt by the way he has been treated in his organization or in the all-powerful Communist Party. The fact that we are now in possession of certain details about the operational capability of this hypersonic glide missile combination puts us in a position we didn’t expect at this point. Its defection may allow us to accelerate defense programs against the use of hypersonic missiles. That can get us up to two years, because that’s how long it could take China to optimize its systems and make that intelligence ineffective. And two years is a long time in this high-tech field.” https://militaeraktuell.at/f-35c-crash-sauerstoff-problem-bei-auto-landung/ “Toxic” work culture? Lin Feng, a Chinese commentator who worked for several years in state-owned military companies, has now claimed on TFIGlobal that the flight of one of China’s top rocket men may not be the last. According to Feng, there are even signs of an exodus of top scientists from China. The Communist Party has direct control over state-owned enterprises, with only party officials deciding who is hired and promoted in the organization. Qualifications, talent and performance(s) are secondary to ideology and party work, a typical sign of the similar internal mechanisms of any dictatorship’s state or command economy, from Hitler’s Germany to the old Soviet Union. According to Li Feng, state-owned companies in China are “shaken” by rivalries and power struggles. Employees who are close to party cadres or the People’s Army are often preferred to others, gifts have to be given to senior citizens and even a strict table culture has to be observed. Close followers of top executives are rewarded with higher salaries and promotions, despite often not being seen at work for days on end. This is one reason why China’s top scientific talent is now disillusioned with the party. If your own expectations are not met, if your self-esteem suffers, you inevitably become rebellious – at first internally. And that has encouraged the top Chinese rocket man to flee Xi Jinping’s China, along with a lot of secret information.

The potential exodus described would be an embarrassing reversal of the Communist Party’s so-called “Thousand Talents” program, under which China once sought to bring leading Chinese scientists, academics and entrepreneurs living abroad back to China. This had helped with China’s covert intellectual property theft and cyber espionage operations, narrowed China’s gap in military technology over its Western rivals immensely and even put it ahead in some sectors. But thanks to its “toxic” work culture and undignified treatment of its top leaders, the biggest blow to China’s ambitions may turn out to come not from the US or India, but from itself, its people and its scientists. China’s subject leadership The alleged defector is said to be linked to the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), the state-owned aerospace and defense company responsible for developing a good portion of the weapons used by China’s air and space forces. It also uses foreign cyber espionage, which allegedly led to the exploitation of data extracted from the F-35 in the 5th generation jets (J-20 and FC-31/J-35). It is not known that AVIC is working directly on ballistic missiles or hypersonic payloads; other government institutions such as the Aerodynamics Research Institute are involved in these areas. However, one issue for AVIC is the very powerful and huge wind tunnels required for development, such as the new wind tunnels such as the new FL-64. To illustrate the dimensions in figures: According to an AVIC statement from November 21, 2021, FL-64 (the predecessor FL-63 had to make do with half the diameter) is about simulating flight speeds of Mach 4 to 8 at an altitude of 48,000 meters (157,480 feet) under a total temperature of 900 Kelvin (626.85 degrees Celsius or 1,160 degrees Fahrenheit). China is also currently building a so-called JF-22 hyper-speed wind tunnel, which will be able to simulate speeds of up to Mach 30. Construction of the facility should be completed this year. “Together with the two existing machines, the tunnel will put China around 20 to 30 years ahead of the West,” said Han Guilai, a scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, to a party newspaper.

In any case, China has recently achieved enormous pioneering achievements in this field with these simulations – each lasting only around 30 seconds – such as the development of the aforementioned DF-17 hypersonic boost-glide vehicle, which was shown for the first time at the 2019 Beijing Military Parade. This medium-range ballistic missile uses the DF-ZF Hypersonic Glide Vehicle instead of a warhead, which circled the globe last summer after separation and “only” hit around 40 kilometers away from the calculated target. This would not be of such great significance with a – purely theoretically assumed – nuclear payload. Incidentally, Beijing officially refers to this as a tested civilian spacecraft. The West fears that such a weapon could take unusual approach routes, for example from the south, and maneuver to overcome the US missile defence “onion”. Incidentally, the Russians also claim to already have a similar gliding vehicle in service, the Avangard. Hypersonic weapons (boost-glide types or hypersonic cruise missiles) travel five times faster than the speed of sound, perhaps even up to 20 times faster at some point if the technology continues to advance and – at least in China, apparently – the huge sums of money required for this continue to flow. https://militaeraktuell.at/gruene-fahrt-bundesheer-testet-wasserstoffautos/ The development is associated with considerable design challenges, the implementation of which is already being left behind by European countries and their industries, for example. One problem is that at these very high speeds and the immense frictional heat, a plasma envelope forms around the missile, which blocks the reception of navigation guidance signals in order to correct the missile – which is precisely what makes these gliding vehicles so “attractive” – during the flight, which is not ballistic in the conventional sense. The test carried out by the Chinese, which – as mentioned earlier – missed the target by 40 kilometers, probably had to deal with the problem of penetrating the plasma sheath with guidance signals. The problem does not seem to have been solved by the engineers – in East and West – yet. If all of the above is true and has actually happened in this or a similar way, there could now be a significant shift in view of China’s presumed lead in the development of corresponding weapons systems.