Similar to China's home-grown C919 airliner, BeiDou serves as an indigenous alternative for a vital technology once only accessible via import - a potential point of weakness, now corrected.

Chinese satnav industry hits US$74 billion output, has 20,000 market entities and employs nearly 1 million people: report During Vladimir Putin's visit to China last week, Beijing and Moscow vowed ...

China uses its homegrown navigation system BeiDou for both military and civilian purposes. BDS, stated to be rivalling GPS, is the fourth global satellite navigation system in the world.