Taiwan's first Qingtian hypersonic missile could enter production in FY2027 defense budget.

Taiwan’s National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology has completed the full-system design of the Qingtian long-range cruise missile, positioning the weapon system for inclusion in the Ministry of National Defense’s FY2027 regular procurement budget, according to The Liberty Times. The transition from engineering development to mass production establishes a dedicated funding line to field road-mobile, long-range conventional strike units. Combining a solid-propellant booster with a high-speed ramjet cruise stage, the missile provides an operational strike range of 1,200 to 2,000 kilometers to reach military targets across central and northern mainland China.

The Qingtian missile, previously designated as Yun Feng II, achieves speeds between Mach 3 and Mach 5 using a solid rocket booster and atmospheric ramjet engine. Upon inclusion in the FY2027 budget, the system will enter serialized production on mobile 10x10 or 12x12 multi-axle transporters to support dispersed land-based operations.

Related topic: Taiwan deploys new HF-3ER anti-ship missiles to threaten Chinese warships well beyond previous limits

On a hypersonic missile, sustained flight at Mach 3 to Mach 5 heats the missile’s nose, leading edges, engine inlet and control surfaces to temperatures that can exceed 1,000°C, depending on altitude, flight duration and local airflow. (Picture source: illustrative image from US DoD)

According to The Liberty Times on August 1, 2026, Taiwan’s first long-range hypersonic cruise missile has completed its full-system design and may be included in the Ministry of National Defense’s FY2027 regular budget, a step that would move the weapon, known as Qingtian, from engineering development into funded production and force formation. Previously identified as Yun Feng II, the Qingtian is said to combine a solid-propellant booster with a ramjet cruise engine, an estimated range of 1,200 to 2,000 km, and a speed between Mach 3 and Mach 5. Those figures would make it Taiwan’s first indigenous conventional missile able to strike military targets across central and northern China rather than targets confined to the Taiwan Strait, China’s southeastern coast or adjacent maritime areas.

At 2,000 km, its engagement zone would include Beijing, Wuhan and military facilities in the provinces that connect China’s coastal theater to its national command, logistics and reinforcement network. Taiwan is pursuing this long-range strike capability while simultaneously developing the Qiang Gong interceptor to raise its ballistic missile defense ceiling from 40 km to 70 km, creating parallel investment in both offensive and defensive capabilities. The Qingtian, also spelled Ching-Tien, is the latest stage of a missile family developed by the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology over more than two decades. Development of the Yun Feng began during the Lee Teng-hui period, and the missile was publicly acknowledged by then-defense minister Chiu Kuo-cheng during a Legislative Yuan hearing in October 2021.

In 2018, Taiwan allocated NT$12.4 billion, equivalent to $390 million at the time, under the Qilin Project to extend the missile’s range and investigate a space-launch derivative capable of placing payloads weighing 50 to 200 kg into a 500 km low-Earth orbit. In August 2019, an enhanced Yun Feng configuration entered production under an initial order for 20 missiles and 10 mobile launchers, establishing a previous production base for the greater Qingtian effort. The 2026 development therefore appears to concern a more advanced Yun Feng II configuration integrating a new cruise stage, guidance architecture, airframe, and road-mobile launch system. Moving the Qingtian into the FY2027 regular budget would establish a recurring procurement line rather than another limited research allocation, but the available information does not provide the planned number of missiles, launchers, batteries, or annual production rate. 

The missile’s propulsion sequence explains both its expected performance and the engineering limits behind the Mach 3 to Mach 5 estimate. A solid-propellant booster accelerates the missile from rest, carries it through the speed range in which a ramjet cannot operate efficiently, and raises it to the altitude selected for cruise. After booster separation, the ramjet compresses incoming atmospheric air, mixes that air with fuel and generates continuous thrust without carrying the heavy oxidizer required by a rocket throughout the entire flight. Taiwan already has experience with this architecture through the Hsiung Feng III anti-ship missile, which uses a solid booster and liquid-fuel ramjet, reaches Mach 3.5, weighs 1,500 kg, measures 6.1 m in length, and carries a 225 kg semi-armor-piercing fragmentation warhead.

Therefore, the Qingtian must logically apply the same broad propulsion principle to a missile flying three to five times farther than the extended-range HF-3, whose range reaches 400 km. That requires greater fuel volume, a larger airframe, longer-duration combustion, more efficient inlet geometry, and thermal protection able to survive sustained high-speed flight for tens of minutes rather than a shorter anti-ship engagement. The resulting missile is likely to be substantially larger than the HF-3 and would require a heavy multi-axle transporter, such as the Tatra Force 12x12 and Oshkosh M983. The Mach 3 to Mach 5 flight envelope also requires a more precise classification than simply labeling every portion of the mission hypersonic.

Mach 5 is the conventional threshold for hypersonic flight, meaning that a missile cruising at Mach 3 or Mach 4 remains supersonic, while only the upper end of the Qingtian’s estimated envelope qualifies as hypersonic. The Taiwanese missile is nevertheless structurally different from China’s DF-17, which uses a ballistic booster to lift a hypersonic glide vehicle before the unpowered vehicle maneuvers through the upper atmosphere. The Qingtian is intended to remain under ramjet propulsion through most of its cruise phase, giving it a flatter atmospheric trajectory and allowing route changes within the limits imposed by fuel, drag and structural loading. A 1,500 km flight at Mach 5 would take less than 20 minutes, while the same distance at Mach 3 would require more than 24 minutes before accounting for boost, climb, maneuvering and terminal descent.

This is shorter than the response cycle required to detect a launch, confirm its trajectory, identify the target area, assign an interceptor battery and complete an engagement, particularly if the missile approaches below the altitude at which long-range ground radars obtain their earliest line of sight. Speed alone does not make the Qingtian uninterceptable, but it narrows the time available for Chinese command decisions and reduces opportunities for a second interceptor launch after a failed first engagement. Sustaining these velocities over 1,200 to 2,000 km creates thermal and navigation problems that directly determine whether the missile can hit a point target. Air compressed at the nose, inlet and leading edges can raise local temperatures beyond 1,000°C, requiring composites, ceramics, heat-resistant alloys or ablative materials to prevent deformation of the airframe and control surfaces.

At the upper end of the speed envelope, ionized gas can form a plasma sheath around the hottest sections of the missile, weakening satellite navigation and command link reception. The Qingtian would consequently need a high-grade inertial navigation system able to maintain a usable position estimate during periods when external updates are unavailable, supplemented by terrain-reference, image-correlation, or stellar-navigation corrections during portions of the route. Inertial drift is especially important to consider: at a range of 2,000 km, an error of only 0.1 percent would produce a 2 km miss, which would be inadequate against an aircraft shelter, command bunker, radar, or missile building. A conventional warhead cannot compensate for kilometer-scale errors, so the missile’s military relevance depends on terminal accuracy and warhead design as much as on speed.

Stable ramjet combustion must also continue while pressure, temperature, altitude, and angle of attack change, because an inlet unstart or flameout hundreds of kilometers from the target would terminate the mission even if the booster and guidance system had functioned correctly. The 1,200 to 2,000 km range changes the geography of Taiwan’s conventional strike options, but it does not mean that every prominent Chinese city would constitute a useful military target. From Taiwan, the lower range estimate covers the Eastern Theater Command’s principal operating depth, including military facilities in Fujian, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Anhui and parts of Guangdong, while the 2,000 km estimate extends coverage toward Hubei, Henan, Shandong, Hebei and Beijing.

Wuhan is relevant because central China contains aviation, logistics, transportation and command infrastructure linking inland bases with the eastern theater, while Beijing contains national-level military command facilities but also the densest air defense environment in China. More immediate wartime targets would include People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force brigade areas, bomber and fighter air bases, fuel storage, ammunition depots, railway transshipment points, military ports, long-range radar sites and command nodes supporting operations against Taiwan. China’s Base 61, which is oriented primarily toward Taiwan, includes brigades associated with the DF-15B, DF-17, DF-11A, DF-15 and DF-16A missiles, placing a large concentration of launch and support infrastructure within the Qingtian’s lower range band.

Consequently, the deployment concept presents a separate survivability problem because the Qingtian is expected to use road-mobile launchers stored in tunnels or hardened shelters before dispersing to prepared firing positions. Taiwan’s mountainous interior provides concealment opportunities, but the island is only 394 km long and 144 km wide at its widest point, leaving limited space in which large launch vehicles can move without entering populated areas, exposed roads or predictable mountain corridors. A 10x10 or 12x12 transporter carrying a large missile requires routes with sufficient turning radius, bridge capacity, overhead clearance and prepared ground, reducing the number of usable launch locations.

Chinese electro-optical, synthetic aperture radar and intelligence satellites could search those routes, while drones, special operations forces and persistent surveillance could examine tunnel entrances and known missile bases after hostilities begin. Survival would require launchers to disperse before Chinese strikes, maintain radio silence, use decoys, alternate between several shelters and avoid remaining at a firing position after launch. Each operational launcher would also require fire control, communications, security, maintenance and reload vehicles, creating a convoy whose signature is larger than that of the transporter alone. A force consisting of 10 launchers, the number ordered for the earlier enhanced Yun Feng production batch, could generate only a limited number of simultaneous launch points and would remain vulnerable to sustained surveillance unless the FY2027 program expands the launcher fleet and its supporting tunnel network.

The Qingtian’s strategic effect will therefore depend on inventory size, launcher availability, penetration rate, accuracy and warhead effect rather than the theoretical ability to reach Beijing. Twenty missiles, the quantity associated with the earlier 2019 Yun Feng order, would not materially reduce the overall size of the Chinese missile, aviation or command structure, especially once launch failures, intercepted weapons, reserve rounds and missiles assigned to multiple targets are considered. Chinese layered air defense, including long-range surface-to-air missiles, fighter patrols, ground radars and passive sensors, would further reduce the number of missiles reaching heavily defended targets. The missile could still impose costs by forcing China to relocate aircraft, disperse supplies, harden facilities and allocate interceptors to inland sites that previously faced little Taiwanese conventional strike risk.

Its most credible contribution would be to threaten a limited set of high-value fixed targets at the operational level, not to provide Taiwan with a conventional equivalent to China’s much larger Rocket Force or to independently halt an invasion. Therefore, the Qiang Gong program addresses the opposite side of this missile competition by extending Taiwan’s engagement ceiling from the Sky Bow III’s 40 km to 70 km. That altitude overlaps the lower near-space region used by maneuvering ballistic targets and hypersonic glide vehicles, including the DF-17, which is associated with a 60 km flight altitude, Mach 10 speed, 2,500 km range, and 10 m accuracy.

Taiwan’s Leshan PAVE PAWS radar can detect high-altitude ballistic targets at distances reaching 3,000 km, but a target travelling at 60 km altitude may not appear within a usable fire control track until it is less than 1,000 km away. At a speed of 2.04 km per second, that distance corresponds to less than eight minutes of flight, during which the defense network must classify the target, calculate an engagement solution, authorize launch, and guide an interceptor. Increasing interception altitude to 70 km enlarges the defended volume and can create an earlier engagement opportunity.

However, it does not remove the need for satellite warning, multiple radar tracks, automated command links, and sufficient interceptors to handle mixed attacks. Mirroring Russian tactics in Ukraine or Iranian ones in the Gulf, China could combine DF-17s, DF-15 and DF-16 ballistic missiles, CJ-10 cruise missiles, decoys and long-range drones to divide Taiwan’s radar attention and exhaust interceptor stocks. Taken together, the Qingtian and the Qiang Gong indicate that Taiwan is building a missile force intended to preserve retaliatory options after an initial strike while contesting Chinese weapons at greater distances and higher altitudes, but the credibility of that force will depend on production scale, hardened infrastructure and command-network survival once combat begins.

Written by Jérôme Brahy

Jérôme Brahy is a defense analyst and documentalist at Army Recognition. He specializes in naval modernization, aviation, drones, armored vehicles, and artillery, with a focus on strategic developments in the United States, China, Ukraine, Russia, Türkiye, and Belgium. His analyses go beyond the facts, providing context, identifying key actors, and explaining why defense news matters on a global scale.

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