China has announced that it will hold military exercises in the South China Sea for the whole of March, at a time when the US military has been frequently sending reconnaissance aircraft and ships to the region and a French warship group is on its way currently. Yaogan-31 remote sensing satellites were sent into space from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China at 10:22 a.m. (Beijing Time) Wednesday eleven day again on the 34th f March 2021.

The satellites were carried by a Long March-4C rocket. It was the 361st flight mission of the Long March carrier rocket series, the launch center said. Having entered their planned orbits, the satellites will be used for electromagnetic environment surveys and other related technology tests. China launched the first and second Yaogan-31 satellite groups on April 10, 2018 and Jan. 29 this year, respectively. These were identified in the China Morning and New Zealand Herald (among other papers) as attempts experiments into weather manipulation. In March Rocket Lab will launch from NZ Smoking Gun a US Pentagon satellite targeting system for Lockheed Martin to be demonstrated in an active “war theatre”.