New carrier — made in China
commissioned sometime before 2020, after sea trials and the arrival of its full air complement.
Vice chairman of China’s Central Military Commission and Communist Party Central Committee member Fan Changlong presided over the launch.
Like the 54,430-tonne Liaoning, which was purchased from Ukraine, the new carrier is based on the Soviet Kuznetsov class design, with a ski jump-style deck for taking off and a conventional oil-fuelled steam turbine power plant. That limits the weight of payloads its planes can carry, its speed and the amount of time it can spend at sea relative to American nuclearpowered carriers.
The main hull of the new carrier has been completed and its power supply put into place. Next up are mooring tests and the debugging of its electronic systems, the Defence Ministry said.
China is believed to be planning to build at least two and possibly as many as four additional carriers, with one of them, the Type 002, reported to be already under construction at a shipyard outside Shanghai. They are expected to be closer in size to the US Navy’s nuclear-powered 90,720-tonne Nimitz class ships, with flat flight decks and catapults to allow planes to launch with more bombs and fuel aboard.
India, along with Japan and Taiwan which also view Chinese carriers as threats, will likely respond by building new submarines and anti-ship missiles, said Ian Easton, a research Fellow at The Project 2049 Institute in Arlington, Virginia.
The new carrier is part of an ambitious expansion of the Chinese navy, which is projected to have up to 273 warships, submarines and logistics vessels by 2020, according to the Washington-based Centre for Naval Analysis. That compares with 275 deployable battle force ships presently in the US Navy, China’s primary rival in the Asia Pacific.
The US operates 10 aircraft carriers, has 62 destroyers to China’s 32, and 75 submarines to China’s 68. The US Navy has 323,000 personnel to China’s 235,000. — AP