What China's missile tests reveal

Do China's numerous missile tests show industrial strength or stockpiling capacity?

They mainly show a broad weapons-development effort and the need to gather the raw data required for reliable testing and simulation.

A large missile-test count is interpreted here as evidence of the breadth of weapons under development and the amount of data still needed. Physical firings supply observations against which later tests and simulations can be assessed. Computer-based testing also depends on a body of empirical results from earlier trials. On that reading, the count alone does not establish the size of an operational stockpile.