Important Takeaways:

• China’s Largest Base Has Replicas Of Taiwan’s Presidential Building, Eiffel Tower
• Through satellite images, we explore China’s premier large-scale training site that has some ominous and bizarre features.
• China has made massive investments in modernizing its military over the better part of the past three decades and has established new and improved research and development and training bases to support those efforts. The People’s Liberation Army has fully embraced the idea of utilizing highly realistic facilities to prepare its forces for the sorts of environments they’d be likely to fight in during future conflicts, drawing significant lessons from the experiences of the U.S. military and those of its allies.
• The Zhurihe Training Base in remote Inner Mongolia is the largest of these sites and notably features a huge full-size mockup a portion of downtown Taipei, the capital of the island of Taiwan, including highly elaborate recreations of its Presidential Office Building and Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There’s also a cloverleaf highway interchange, a mock airfield and, bizarrely, a replica of France’s Eiffel Tower.
• Interestingly, this isn’t the only Eiffel Tower replica in China, either. There is another one in Tianducheng, China, a suburb of Hangzhou in the country’s Zhejiang Province, which has an overall aesthetic meant to evoke the architecture in the French capital Paris. There is another recreation of the Eiffel Tower at the Window of the World theme park in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, situated on the mainland just outside Hong Kong.

Read the original article by clicking here.