Chinese papers have revealed, quoting delegates of the People’s Liberation Army who are attending the annual parliamentary session in Beijing that sea tests of China’s indigenous electromagnetic railguns are under way. This has been further confirmed by a feature on the PLA-run news portal 81.cn bout a female lead engineer who was the brains behind a repeating pulsating direct current power system that could charge the railgun. Zhang Xiao, associate research fellow at the Wuhanbased PLA Naval University of Engineering, said the breakthrough was a hardwon result after hundreds of failures and more than 50,000 tests. She also led a team that scaled the technical hurdles of installing shipborne electromagnetic launching systems, believed to be planned for use in future Chinese aircraft carriers. The Global Times quoted commentators as saying that the US used to maintain a lead in developing such state-of-the-art power systems, but the breakthrough could bring the PLA Navy into the same league as the US in railgun development and trials.