- China’s construction of modern aircraft carriers will create a modern, blue-water navy and significantly increase its capabilities.
- Aircraft carriers are important to China’s national identity and vision of becoming a great power.
- Aircraft carriers are also useful tools that China can use to address a variety of strategic and security challenges.
China is building a fleet of aircraft carriers and is improving its technology and capabilities at a ferocious pace.
While aircraft carriers provide new aviation capabilities to the Chinese Navy, they are also a key element of China’s vision for the future, giving it the ability to project great power power and influence.
China’s newest aircraft carrier is the Fujian, a large conventionally powered aircraft carrier that completed sea trials earlier this spring. By all accounts, the Fujian is a vast improvement over China’s first two aircraft carriers. It is the only vessel of its class and is larger than the Soviet-style aircraft carriers, with a greater air-carrying capacity.
Most notably, the Fujian lacks the ski-jump style ramps seen on China’s Shandong- and Liaoning-class aircraft carriers. Instead, its flight deck is equipped with an electromagnetic catapult launch system like the U.S. Navy’s new Ford-class carriers.
Currently, only China and the United States have the technology, which would allow larger aircraft carrying more fuel, supplies and weapons to be launched more efficiently and effectively, adding another asset and option to air forces.
The leap from ski jumps to catapult systems is already a big one, but China has also launched steam-powered catapults, which was the natural next step from jumping ramps.
The move indicates China is pushing technological boundaries as it builds and develops its new aircraft carriers, reinforcing the view that its massive shipbuilding capabilities enable it to develop, test and field capabilities faster than rivals.
“China is now on pace to understand what it takes to successfully put an aircraft carrier at sea, and when you combine that with China’s shipbuilding capabilities, they can plan to build a large number of carriers in a short period of time,” said Matthew Funaiole, a senior fellow at the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
China’s strengths in shipbuilding and political motivations for building aircraft carriers are driving it toward a blue-water navy. China plans to build and field a total of six aircraft carriers by 2035, which would give China a fleet just over half the size of the U.S.’s carrier force. But numbers aren’t everything.
China has a roadmap of its ambitions for the coming decades: By 2027, under the orders of Communist Party leader Xi Jinping, the People’s Liberation Army is expected to be fully modernized and capable of invading Taiwan if it so chooses, and China has set a goal of transforming the country into a modern power with a “world-class military” by 2049.
The “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” is a core Chinese ambition, though interpretations vary. U.S. Army Lt. Col. Kyle Amonson and former Coast Guard Colonel Dane Egli wrote in a 2023 Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs article that this monumental Chinese endeavor is “President Xi Jinping’s ultimate goal,” with the goal being “for China to become the world’s leading power by 2049.”
“In this era of strategic competition, no strategic goal is more ambitious and anticipated than the annexation of Taiwan,” they wrote, adding that this would establish “Xi Jinping’s place in history” and help him further consolidate power.
In relation to the Communist Party of China’s goal of 2049 being achieved within 100 years of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, China wants to “establish a naval presence and project power on a global scale,” Funaiole explained, and while it may not be able to achieve that in the same way the U.S. does, China wants the ability to project power, and “aircraft carriers are a big part of how China thinks it can achieve those goals.”
Such a future — one in which Chinese aircraft carriers sail around the world like the U.S. Navy’s — is not necessarily difficult to imagine, given that China currently has many domestic and economic problems but is pursuing U.S. military power with a speed and capability that clearly worries U.S. officials and military leaders.
Aircraft carriers are symbols of military power. Carrying thousands of sailors and dozens of fighter jets, and often surrounded by other warships with capabilities of their own, these carriers represent a nation’s far-reaching influence and are as much a status symbol as a navy’s wartime asset.
For China, possessing aircraft carriers would enable it to reap many of these benefits, giving it the ability to project power into the East, South and West China Seas. Such a physical presence could help China increase its capacity as a power broker in the Pacific, Indian Ocean and perhaps even further, Funaiore said.
Apart from military purposes, aircraft carriers also serve diplomatic, signalling and humanitarian purposes, ensuring proper sea lanes for communication and trade, giving China an advantage in regions such as the Gulf and challenging the US Navy’s status as a guarantor of international trade.
Some of these are low priorities for China, but airlines are offering Beijing options.
Funaiole explained that China may have a different philosophy than the United States on how to use aircraft carriers, wanting the ability to project power when and where it wants, which he said is different from how the United States expands its influence.
“The United States has a very different way of thinking about its role in the world than China,” Funaiole said.
Part of the reason may be China’s history: As retired U.S. Navy Commander Michael Dahm and New America strategist and author Peter W. Singer wrote in Defense One earlier this month, the defeat at the Battle of the Yalu River in 1894 and the “century of humiliation” that followed weighed heavily on the minds of China and the People’s Liberation Army Navy leadership.
These factors, combined with China’s long-standing desire to build an aircraft carrier and how it represents national pride, create a situation in which the success of China’s aircraft carrier program is directly linked to its success in becoming a great power, if not the world’s leading power.
But just because China is building aircraft carriers at a rapid pace doesn’t mean it will avoid the growing pains that come with operating one: China’s biggest problem will be staffing them with the right people and experience, something the United States has mastered over more than a century of operating carriers.
China’s carrier force is only a little over a decade old, so its senior officers are still in their infancy and may not have the expertise to train new recruits — and as technological leaps continue to occur between carrier types, that learning gap is only going to widen.
Of course, China can and has learned from decades of U.S. trial and error, but that doesn’t mean it can build what former defense official and U.S. Navy aviator Guy Snodgrass describes as the “connective tissue” needed to conduct carrier operations, launch large-scale sorties, and seamlessly integrate everything from aviation to maintenance to logistics, without firsthand experience. You can’t learn things unless you do them.
