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The journalist's plane is flying over the Badain Jaran Desert. This is a desert in China that spans the provinces of Gansu, Ningxia and Inner Mongolia. It covers an area of 49,000 sq. kilometers. By size it is the third largest desert in China. The destination of our plane is an airport in the desert. This is an airport you won't find in any official maps, and this is an airport you'll never know its exact name in public. While the airport is just a tip of the iceberg, a tremendous military base is yet to appear. For the mysterious military base, insiders call the base as China's "Area 51".

The "Base" was set up formally in December 2003 after approved by the Central Military Commission of China, aiming at conducting air force operational tests. On December 25^th, 2003, the final target practice of J-10 fighters was conducted in the desert. As the missile launched by the fighter precisely hit a target nearly a hundred kilometers away, deafening cheers drowned everything in the control room. The explosion was like a firework celebrating the fact that China had joined the ranks of the few countries that can independently produce third-generation fighters.

January 9^th, 2005, again, J-10 fighter destroyed a target in the sky of the desert. Remarkably, this time, the missile was a newly produced air-to-air missile that was made in China. It indicated a new generation of air weapons developed by the Chinese Air Force had reached battle effectiveness.

The test of the J-10 fighters is just one of the missions carried out by the base. Target testing is an important phase in the weapons production process. Only when new weapons have passed stringent tests, can they be put into production and used to equip the troops. In the past 50 years, the base has approved three generations of homemade air-defense missiles as well as third-generation multi-functional fighters, CK-1 unmanned target drones, and supersonic unmanned jets.

There is only one slogan in the "Base". That is "confidential". It's a word remembered by every Chinese soldier. In China's public media, except for several open military troops, almost all the troops are unnamed. Though long time has passed since the war years, the "Base" still has an intangible air of tenseness around it.