Technological Progress in ‘Time War’ With the West

Technological Progress in ‘Time War’ With the West

Executive Summary:

• The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has identified control over time, and the precision behind the “granting of time” as a critical capability. It seeks to weaponize “chronopolitics” to gain geopolitical and military advantages—precise timekeeping is critical for the military’s intelligentized warfare doctrine and is perceived as essential for avoiding GPS disruption.
• Two key aspects of Beijing’s push for sovereignty over the technologies of time are the BeiDou Satellite Navigation system and the National Time Service Center, which help keep the financial system, the power grid, and weapons systems synchronized.
• “Time discourse power,” the PRC’s attempt to expand its global influence, is also evident in its growing importance in setting technical standards. By 2030, it hopes to entrench its timekeeping standards globally through developing the next quantum-based technologies that define the length of a second. Its strontium clock already accounts for 20 percent of the International Atomic Clock’s national weighed calculation, which is shared between the United States, Britain, France, and Japan.

In the spring of 1996, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) launched missiles into the sea around Taiwan to intimidate the island before its first free and direct presidential election. Then, by accounts that have since hardened into legend inside the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), two of the missiles lost their way after the U.S. severed connection to the American satellite signal guiding them (Sina Military, December 31, 2012). From that humiliation, Beijing drew an enduring lesson: to achieve absolute security in its capabilities, it would have to control the technologies that enabled them. In this case, achieving control meant exerting power over the measurement of time itself.

Time is fundamental to the operation of the modern world, and the task of anchoring it has often intersected with political power. When the great powers fixed the world’s meridian at Greenwich, England, in 1884, the clocks of all nations were forced to tick in line with British naval supremacy. Today, modern financial markets, satellites in orbit, and precision weapons all depend on a common understanding of time that is exact to the microsecond.

Beijing has long shared this view of its importance. The National Time Service Center (NTSC; 国家授时中心) describes time as a “core strategic resource for the state” (国家核心战略资源) and state media has similarly described synchronized time as a “strategic instrument bearing on national security” (关乎国家安全的战略重器). Top scientists, meanwhile, have declared that “wherever the nation’s interests extend, its timing service will follow” (国家利益拓展到哪里，我们的授时服务就跟到哪里), and that “in an age of precision strike, the atomic clock matters no less than the atomic bomb” (在精确打击时代，原子钟的作用不亚于原子弹) (Xinhua, February 10, 2022; NSTC, May 29). As this suggests, “chronopolitics” (时间政治) is also central to military strategy, which weaponizes time with a view to converting control of the clock into military advantage and geopolitical power (Chinese Social Sciences Net, March 6, 2025; Taiwan Strait Studies, April 16).

Building a Domestic Supply Chain in Time

Central to Beijing’s chronopolitical ambitions is the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (北斗卫星导航系统), the domestic rival to GPS. The PRC government casts BeiDou as a “spatiotemporal benchmark” (时空基准) that the country must build and run independently in the name of national security (Xinhua, November 4, 2022; China Brief, March 1, 2024). Every BeiDou satellite in orbit is a clock. Collectively, these “grant time” (授时), which they broadcast to keep finance, the power grid, and weapons systems synchronized (Yuyuan Tantian, October 19, 2025).

BeiDou is only the visible layer of a broader national system that fuses satellites with long-wave radio and fiber-optic cables into a single space-and-ground whole (星地一体). This realizes an ambition that Qian Xuesen (钱学森), the father of the PRC’s missile program, articulated back in 1974, to build “a single great clock for China” (中国大钟) (Xinhua, February 10, 2022). The BeiDou system is a mixed constellation that spans three types of orbits, unlike GPS, which relies on one. Its reach is increasingly global, with ground stations dotted along the partner countries of the Digital Silk Road (数字丝绸之路) (Reference News, October 10, 2025; Guangming Daily, May 28).

The key institution that issues national standard time in the PRC is the National Time Service Center (NTSC; 国家授时中心) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Located inland in Xi’an, it was initially set up in 1966 under the codename 326, and hewn into a mountainside with control rooms built to survive a nuclear attack (CCTV, October 19, 2025). The original purpose of the center, which now sets “Beijing Time” (北京时间) and transmits it across the country, was to support weapons developed as part of what was retroactively named the “Two Bombs, One Satellite” (两弹一星) program (NTSC, November 10, 2022; Chinese Academy of Sciences [CAS], March 7, 2024; People’s Daily, January 2, 2025). The NTSC’s remit today is openly dual-use. Its synchronized time serves civilian applications including finance, telecommunications, the electricity grid, and transport, alongside military uses such as missile guidance, satellite tracking, and command and control systems (Beijing News, October 19, 2025).

The drive for autonomy extends down to the smallest constituent parts of each satellite. At the level of policy planning, the outline for the 15th Five-Year Plan calls for breakthroughs in quantum precision measurement (量子精密测量), the field from which ever smaller and more exact clocks now flow (Xinhua, March 13). Those breakthroughs are already taking place. Wuhan University’s Satellite Navigation and Positioning Technology Research Centre (武汉大学卫星导航定位技术研究中心) recently unveiled what it calls the world’s smallest chip-scale atomic clock. The device, which measures just 2.3 cubic centimeters, is roughly a seventh the size of its American equivalent, and its developers are now mass-producing it in the hope of breaking the foreign monopoly on these devices (Guancha, March 19; Changjiang Daily, April 20).

State media coverage has linked the clock explicitly to the Party’s political aspirations, describing its purpose as keeping the nation’s “time discourse power” (时间话语权)—in other words, PRC relative influence in chronometric technologies—in Chinese hands. The device already serves satellites in low Earth orbit, underwater BeiDou receivers, and drone swarms—all of which would be critical in a conflict in which PLA capabilities would be denied GPS access (Beijing Youth News, May 23, 2024; Changjiang Daily, March 12).

Time is of the Essence for the Military

Temporal precision is more important than ever for military applications. In 2017, the PLA Daily listed “command of time” (制时间权) among other new forms of battlefield control, and set it alongside older domains such as command of the sea (制海权) and the air (制空权) (PLA Daily, October 24, 2017). The PLA Daily article observed this development through the collapse of the U.S. military’s kill chain from 48 hours in the 1991 Gulf War down to just 10 seconds in Iraq in 2003. Underscoring the growing importance of precision and speed, the article stated, “lose a millisecond at any link, and victory may change hands” (某个环节失之毫秒，就极有可能胜败易手) (PLA Daily, October 24, 2017).

More recently, former chief of staff of the PLA Rocket Force, Lieutenant General Li Jun (李军), urged the PLA to treat the “time battlefield” (时间战场) as a new domain of war, with its own wargaming system and tactical library for time-based attack and defense (时间攻防战术库) (PLA Daily, January 27).

Satellite navigation systems today rely on extreme precision in timekeeping, down to a billionth of a second: a one nanosecond lag time in a satellite navigation system causes an error of roughly 30 centimeters (Changjiang Daily, March 12; European Space Agency, accessed July 17). These systems also underpin the PLA’s doctrine of intelligentized warfare (智能化作战), which seeks to fully remove human delay from the kill chain. This doctrine treats time advantage (时间优势) and the resilience of its time-unification system (时统系统) as core capabilities, and has spent several years working to build them (PLA Daily, February 2, 2023).

A recent alleged attack illustrates the PLA’s sense of urgency. In October 2025, the Ministry of State Security accused the U.S. National Security Agency of penetrating the NTSC. It alleged that the U.S. government agency had planted tools to paralyze the PRC’s national time standard on command. This, state media alleged, was the gravest threat the country’s “time security” (时间安全) had faced to date, and amounted to an act of aggression in an outright “time war” (时间战) (Yuyuan Tantian; CCTV, October 19, 2025; Sina, October 20, 2025; China Brief, November 7, 2025).

Time to Set Global Standards

The PRC’s chronopolitics extends beyond the military domain. A broader campaign sees it as part of Beijing’s attempts to influence international technical standards that others must follow. In 2021, the Party leadership issued a “National Standardization Outline” (国家标准化发展纲要) committing the PRC to build a standards system “with Chinese characteristics” (具有中国特色) by 2035 that the rest of the world would adopt as its own (Xinhua, October 10, 2021). As the PLA Daily had put the motivation for this several years prior, “whoever commands the standard commands all under heaven” (得标准者得天下) (PLA Daily, November 24, 2017).

Beijing already has made impressive strides in shaping international standards. By its own official count, as far back as 2018, it contributed close to a third of the world’s 5G standard submissions and was leading two-fifths of standardization projects. It now contributes over 40 percent of global 5G standard essential patent declarations and more than half of its global 5G base stations. It means to expand these efforts, and ultimately set the terms for the systems the coming century will run on, from mobile networks to artificial intelligence (Economic Daily, May 22, 2019; Beijing Municipal Intellectual Property Office, July 19, 2024).

The contest over standards became more acute following a 2022 vote by the world’s metrologists to redefine the second as a unit of time by 2030. The new definition will likely be far more exact, since the optical frequency standards of multiple national time services are now up to 100 times more accurate than the cesium standard (BIPM, 2022; National Institute of Metrology of China, November 23, 2022; CAS, February 21, 2023). [1] Optical clocks, which function by measuring these oscillations, are quantum machines, and the PRC has several advantages in the race to build them—it already leads on a number of subfields of quantum technologies, such as quantum communication (China Brief, June 11). The PRC’s strontium clock NTSC-Sr2 (锶光钟) now helps steer International Atomic Time, a standard that until recently only the United States, Britain, France, and Japan kept. Its weight within that calculation has climbed from less than 6 percent in 2021 to nearly 20 percent, the second-largest national share (National Business Daily, October 20, 2025; Science and Technology Daily, February 13). The PRC has also placed the world’s first optical clock in orbit, as part of a system to distribute ultra-precise time (CAS, November 1, 2022; NTSC, February 12).

Conclusion

The PRC increasingly treats timekeeping as an instrument of national power. It sees control over its ultra-precise measurement as critical to its economy and its military, and as an avenue to enhance its influence internationally through setting global standards.

In a Taiwan contingency, this domestic technology would enable Chinese forces to degrade GPS through electronic warfare while their own units rely on BeiDou, solving a problem Beijing was first confronted with 30 years ago. As more countries adopt the system, its resilience will grow even further.

Where the United States and much of Europe still keep time overwhelmingly based on satellite signals, the PRC has fused satellite, long-wave, and fiber-optic cables into a single, integrated civil-military architecture. Beijing’s weight in global timekeeping is climbing and its standards are spreading. The longer Washington and its allies treat time as settled infrastructure rather than contested terrain, the more of it they stand to forfeit.

Notes

[1] In 1967, the 13th General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) officially redefined the second, replacing the previous astronomical definition with an atomic one. Since then, one second has been defined as the duration during which the radiation associated with a cesium-133 atom undergoes 9,192,631,770 oscillations (BIPM, accessed July 16).