China’s ‘Beijing Military City’: What We Know About the Secret Command Complex

China is building a vast, partly underground construction site about 20 miles southwest of central Beijing that U.S. intelligence officials and outside analysts believe is a new wartime military command center. Nicknamed “Beijing Military City,” the roughly 1,500-acre project has been described by U.S. officials as on track to be at least 10 times the size of the Pentagon, and nearly two years after it was first reported, Beijing still has not publicly acknowledged what it is.

What satellite images show

The Financial Times first reported the project in late January 2025, publishing satellite images and citing current and former U.S. officials who said the intelligence community was closely monitoring it, according to The Telegraph’s account of that report. The imagery suggested major construction began in mid-2024.

Renny Babiarz, a former imagery analyst at the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, said the pictures indicated about 100 cranes working across a three-mile site to build several underground facilities joined by tunnels, the Telegraph reported. Analysts quoted in the coverage pointed to deep excavation pits as a sign that hardened bunkers are planned.

Switzerland’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung placed the site in Xishifu, a village in Beijing’s Fangshan district, and compared Planet Labs images from July 2023 and January 2025. Its review of Copernicus Sentinel-2 imagery suggested work began in late 2023, somewhat earlier than the FT’s estimate. The newspaper also noted posts on Chinese forums from December 2023 asking why villages in Fangshan were being demolished.

Later imagery shows the work has kept going. Business Insider published Maxar images in April 2025 showing the site’s change from mostly open and residential land in February 2022 to a dense grid of roads and tunnels by mid-2024. Newsweek has published a Sentinel-2 time-lapse and, later, high-definition images showing month-by-month progress. No completion date has been published.

Why officials compare it to the Pentagon

The “Pentagon” comparison is about scale, not a confirmed role as a defense ministry headquarters. A former senior U.S. intelligence official told the FT that China’s main secure command center sits in the Western Hills, northeast of the new site, and was built decades ago during the Cold War. “The size, scale and partially buried characteristics of the new facility suggest it will replace the Western Hills complex as the primary wartime command facility,” the official said, adding that “Chinese leaders may judge that the new facility will enable greater security against US ‘bunker buster’ munitions, and even against nuclear weapons.”

An unnamed China researcher who viewed the images told the FT the site had “all the hallmarks of a sensitive military facility.” Lyle Morris of the Asia Society Policy Institute wrote on X that “the deep bunkering suggests preparations for a nuclear C2 command,” Newsweek reported.

Some analysts are more cautious. Hsu Yen-chi of Taiwan’s Council on Strategic and Wargaming Studies told the FT the land area was “much larger than a normal military camp and military school, so it can only be assumed that it is a site for an administrative organization or a large training base.”

Secrecy on the ground

Reporters who visited found no visible military presence, but signs warned against drones and photography, a checkpoint blocked the back of the site, and nearby hiking trails had been closed, according to the FT’s reporting as relayed by the Telegraph. NZZ reported that guards turned visitors away and a site manager left without answering questions. Chinese government websites and local media have not mentioned the project.

Beijing’s response

China’s government has not confirmed the facility’s existence or purpose. A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington told the FT the embassy was “not aware of the details” and said China was “committed to the path of peaceful development and a defense policy that is defensive in nature.” The Foreign Ministry had not commented as of the latest reports reviewed by The Boston Report, and we found no Chinese state media coverage addressing the site.

The larger buildup

The project fits into a wider U.S. assessment of China’s military growth. The Pentagon’s 2025 annual report to Congress on China’s military, released Dec. 23, 2025, says the People’s Liberation Army is steadily working toward 2027 goals, including the ability to win a war over Taiwan and to “strategically counterbalance” the United States in the nuclear field. The report also lists dozens of senior officers removed in an anti-corruption purge that hit the Rocket Force hardest. The report does not appear to discuss the Beijing site directly.

Researchers have also tied the site to the question of how deep China’s leadership bunkers go. A 2025 article by Cindy Hurst for the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office described the complex as a planned underground command center for the Central Military Commission, Asia Times reported in March 2026. The same piece cited James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment, who wrote in the Journal of Strategic Studies that some Chinese leadership command posts may be buried as deep as 700 meters.

For more on PLA activity, see our coverage of China’s latest military flights around Taiwan and the Quad foreign ministers’ warning on coercion.

Sources

• The Telegraph: China building world’s largest military command centre (relaying the Financial Times report), Jan. 31, 2025
• Neue Zürcher Zeitung: Seen from space, secret military building site near Beijing, Feb. 18, 2025
• U.S. Department of Defense: 2025 Annual Report to Congress on Military and Security Developments Involving the PRC (.gov)
• Business Insider: Satellite photos of China’s new military headquarters, April 2025

Additional sources

• Newsweek: Timelapse of China’s wartime command site
• Newsweek: New satellite photos of the Beijing site
• Asia Times: US bunker-buster hits on Iran drive China deeper underground, March 2026