BEIJING/HONG KONG, July 30 (Reuters) - China's state media has hinted at the wider deployment of one of its most closely watched weapons, the YJ-20 hypersonic anti-ship missile.
CCTV's military channel and the state-backed Global Times tabloid on Wednesday highlighted footage of a Type 052D destroyer firing one of the YJ-20 missiles — a weapon unveiled at a military parade in Beijing last September.
The missile is known to have been deployed on its large Type-055 cruisers, but the footage marks the first time it has been seen on a Type 052 vessel, the Global Times reported.
China deploys 40-odd Type 052s, forming the backbone of its destroyer fleet. The vessels are now frequently seen in the disputed South China Sea and elsewhere across East Asia.
The Global Times noted that the missile was "cold launched" vertically — ejected from its launcher before its engine ignited.
CCTV showed the footage on a trailer for a six-part documentary due to start screening from July 30 to mark the 99th anniversary of the People's Liberation Army.
Western and Asian military attaches say China's hypersonic ballistic missiles are among its most formidable weapons under development, and the YJ-20 is considered a significant improvement on earlier variants, with a range of up to 1,500 km (930 miles) and an ability to target moving ships.
Such a weapon would likely be deployed to help China's navy control East Asian seas in any Taiwan conflict scenarios, attaches say.
A hypersonic weapon can travel at Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound, a factor that makes it difficult for even advanced militaries to counter.
"China has the world's leading hypersonic missile arsenal and continued to advance the development of conventional and nuclear-armed hypersonic missile technologies during the past year," the Pentagon said in its annual assessment of China's military modernization, released in December.
(Reporting By Beijing newsroom and Greg Torode; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
