An article in the US publication Politico on February 8, cited data from the Munich Security Conference stating that China is dominating research into technology that could allow missiles to travel five times the speed of sound and outmaneuver air defense systems. In 2017, the vast majority of scientific publications into such “hypersonic” technology were published by Chinese researchers. The figures show 716 publications from China, compared to 207 from the United States, 76 from Russia, and 57 publications from India. At the same time, the annual number of Chinese articles in the field increased more than five-fold from 2007 to 2017, according to the report. The number of papers do not, however, indicate the quality of research. 

(Comment: Hypersonic vehicles have two great advantages to old-fashioned ballistic missiles: (i) they can fly lower and be steered more flexibly than old-school missiles, which move in a fixed trajectory toward their impact point; and (ii) they are simply too fast to be caught by existing air defense systems.)