How much you wanna bet they were allowed to steal the technology from the US Patent Office?

One laser weapons expert said the new weapon can “burn through clothes in a split second … If the fabric is flammable, the whole person will be set on fire.”

“The pain will be beyond endurance,” according to the researcher who tested a prototype at the Xian Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shaanxi province.

The 15mm rifle weighs 6.6 pounds — about the same as an AK-47 — and has a range of 800 meters, or half a mile. It can be mounted on cars, boats and planes.

The ZKZM-500, which costs about $15,000, is ready for mass production and is likely to be given to anti-terrorism units of the Chinese police.

The weapon is powered by a rechargeable lithium battery and produces no sound, so “nobody will know where the attack came from. It will look like an accident,” another researcher said.