Can China rule the waves?

Rule Beijing, Beijing Rules the Waves!

Not yet it doesn’t. Nor, despite the launch of its third aircraft carrier, will it for several decades – if at all.

This month China sailed its third flattop out of Shanghai’s Jiangnan Shipyard, and… it floated. It’s a start. Now comes three years of fitting the interestingly named Fujian out with the kit to make it battleworthy, and then years of trying to get up to speed with the strategic knowledge already possessed by countries with long experience of carrier group operations such as the US, the UK, and India.

Nevertheless, the Fujian is a significant step towards Chinese parity in technology with the US, if not experience and number of carriers. The United States has 11 aircraft carriers and intends to maintain at least 10 in the decades ahead.

The great leap forward is because the 80,000-ton Fujian is equipped with catapults to throw heavy fighter jets off the flat deck as opposed to the ski jumps on the ends of the two previous Chinese carriers. It’s reported that the catapults are electromagnetic, not steam driven, and as such match the launch technology on the latest American carrier – the USS Gerald R. Ford – the world’s largest such vessel. Yet the Fujian is not nuclear-powered, meaning it will require an array of support ships to go on long distance missions.

Despite this limitation, having three carriers means China’s navy can retire its first, and very outdated version, the Liaoning, for training purposes, and still be confident that there will be one either at sea, or ready to deploy at all times. Beijing is not yet ready to have a global carrier presence which means it can keep a combat-ready ship in the China seas region. 

China intends to have at least five aircraft carriers that will all eventually be nuclear powered. During the years of building and training, it can continue to develop the naval base it has in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, and the port in Sri Lanka it has on lease for 99 years. It is also modernising Pakistan’s Gwadar port on the Arabian Sea and could adapt it to take carriers. A recent report in the Washington Post suggested that China and Cambodia have agreed to modernise the latter’s Ream Naval Base. Cambodia denies it will allow basing rights for Chinese warships, which means – watch this space.  

In trumpeting the launch of the Fujian, the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece, The Global Times headlined its article “Victorious voyage”. It recalled how, in 1975, the People’s Liberation Army Navy “failed to seize the opportunity to retrieve” some islands from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and that “these missed opportunities showed that only naval strength can decide the actual control of remote islands”.

That statement may have alarmed people on remote – and indeed not so remote – islands in the region such as… Taiwan. China’s new aircraft carrier is named after the province which faces Taiwan. That’s a statement of potential intent, but even when the Fujian comes into service it doesn’t make an invasion of Taiwan inevitable. In 2025 it will still require an eight-hour crossing in rough seas by 500,000 troops to try and take the island. And the Chinese probably still won’t know if some of the 11 American aircraft carrier groups will be in the way, nor the scale of economic sanctions that would follow in their wake.

The Fujian is not a game-changer, but it is another step forward in Beijing’s attempt to change the game. It’s another reason for the American navy to keep its distance from China, and another sign of China’s long sail into becoming a global naval power.