Jeffrey LewisRumsfeld to Visit China's 2nd Artillery HQ

Ann Scott Tyson of the Washington Post reports that Secretary Rumsfeld will “for the first time to visit the headquarters of China’s most secretive military command, the Second Artillery Corps … at Qinghe outside Beijing… (right).”

The news reports are interesting because they confirm the location of the Second Artillery HQ as Qinghe (a suburb of Beijing), as well as China’s national command complex in the Western Hills (Xishan) also a Beijing suburb.

The Qinghe HQ was not exactly a secret—Chinese scientific publications by authors with a Second Artillery affiliation usually contain the 100085 postal code for Qinghe. And then there are the giant scarlett dueces splashed on the walls of the HQ complex. Mark Stokes wrote in China’s Strategic Modernization:

The tall white Second Artillery Headquarters building, which has the roman number “two” written on its surrounding walls, is clearly visible to the west when driving from Beijing through Qinghe on the way to the Great Wall at Badaling.

Getting a picture is on my “to do” list.

The declassified intelligence record about the complex at Qinghe—limited to this heavily redacted intelligence report—suggests this complex is used for routine operations; wartime operations would be conducted from another facility … more on that in a moment:

4. (-C/NF-) ON THE SUBJECT OF 2ND ARTILLERY COMMAND AND CONTROL, … THE 2ND ARTILLERY’S ROUTINE COMMAND CENTER IS LOCATED IN THE BASEMENT OF THE MAIN HEADQUARTERS BUILDING …. THE 2ND ARTILLERY’S COMMUNICATIONS CENTER IS ALSO WITHIN THE COMPOUND. IN A CONTINGENCY SITUATION, THE 2ND ARTILLERY COMMAND STAFF WOULD BE COLLOCATED WITH THE GENERAL STAFF DEPARTMENT COMMAND CENTER…. … NOT AWARE OF ANY OTHER INDEPENDENT 2ND ARTILLERY COMMAND CENTER. … … A 2ND ARTILLERY RESEARCH INSTITUTE IS LOCATED NORTH OF THE HEADQUARTERS COMPLEX, ON THE NORTH SIDE OF THE ROAD WHICH RUNS JUST OUTSIDE OF THE NORTHERN EDGE OF THE HEADQUARTERS COMPLEX. …

[snip]

3. (-C/NF-) IN DISCUSSING THE 2ND ARTILLERY’S COMMAND AND CONTROL, … THE ONLY INDEPENDENT NUCLEAR MISSILE COMMAND CENTER IS LOCATED AT THE HEADQUARTERS COMPLEX … DURING WARTIME, CHINESE STRATEGIC MISSILE FORCES WOULD BE CONTROLLED FROM THE GSD COMMAND CENTER.

Now, that other facility.

The other location is apparently the General Staff Department HQ in the Western Hills (Xishan)—basically another suburb of Beijing, which Michael Swaine described in The Military and Political Succession in China as the “central headquarters of the PLA command and control apparatus…”

The Western Hills complex was (is?) connected to Beijing’s vast underground civil defense network (left).

Apparently the Pentagon wanted to get inside this facility—mentioned in passing in Lewis and Xue, China’s Strategic Seapower. But the Chinese rejected what Tyson described as “a long-standing U.S. request to visit what some defense officials call the ‘real Chinese Pentagon’—a command center in the Western Hills outside the capital. Gertz has more. though I loathe to link to such a man.

I’ve been meaning to get a picture of the Second Artillery HQ and go down into the abandoned Beijing underground. Now I can do both and call them research excursions

Comments

  1. Allen Thomson (History)

    Cued in by the estimable globalsecurity.org, I find that if one puts “40 01 00.23 N , 116 19 47.05 E” into the Google Earth search box, one seems to land on the roof of the 2nd Artillery HQ. It’s hard to be sure given the not-great resolution, but the general appearance seems right.

    BTW, does anybody know how to suggest areas in need of higher- resolution coverage to Google?

  2. eyeballmil

    In absence of high resolution imagery of the HQ, I did the overlay with the picture and information from globalsecurity.org. Nevertheless, it is an awesome tool.