China Is Building 119 Mysterious Missile Silos in the Desert

>“We’re stumbling into an arms race that is largely driven by US investments and missile defense,”

People who reported them (in public) have very good idea what they are. The are not thinking it's huge escalation.

The most likely explanation is that Chinese put maybe 20-30 missiles with MIRV warheads into 199 silos and maintain protocols that don't reveal the location of those missiles. Rest of the silos work as "sponges" for attacking warheads. The distance between silos is to prevent single warhead destroying more than one silo. If enemy wants to destroy 20 ICBM's they have to use 199 warheads to do so.

The US had similar plans for their ICBM's, but it was politically impossible to use eminent domain to get enough land to get 10X more silos.

Most Chinese ICBM's are road mobile or in railway cars. Stored in huge tunnel networks.

sources:

https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1212307/nuclear-silo...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/china-nucle...

I guess it's the game of the fittest, but why should one have more than, say, 300 missiles? Each of them has a devastating power and just a single one would bring the sending country in danger of embargaments. So why have them in the first place at all?