Sections of a ship at Jiangnan Group's Changxing Island shipbuilding facility near Shanghai may be parts of China's first indigenously built aircraft carrier.
Images of the blocks recently began appearing on Chinese military forums and websites and have been corroborated by DigitalGlobe satellite imagery of the Changxing Island site dated 3 March 2013. The structure of the block does not resemble any of the commercial vessels currently under construction in the surrounding docks.
China commissioned its first aircraft carrier, Liaoning , in 2012 after refitting the former Soviet Kuznetsov (Orel) (Project 1143.5/6)-class vessel in Dalian. Liaoning has been repeatedly described as a training platform that would precede the construction and commissioning of homegrown carriers.
The section shown in satellite imagery at Changxing island appears to be around 24-27 m wide at the waterline and 46-52 m wide at the top where it would meet the wider flight deck. It has a space for a hangar that would be 20-22.3 m wide and 4.5-5.1 m high at this section of the forward hull and may become beamier and more spacious towards the centre section.
By comparison, Liaoning and its sister ship Admiral Kuznetsov are approximately 70 m wide at their widest point on the flight deck and 37 m at the waterline. India's Kiev-class carrier Vikramaditya (ex- Admiral Gorshkov ) is smaller with a 51 m-wide deck and width of 32.7 m at the waterline.
IHS Jane's Fighting Ships notes Liaoning 's hangar as being 29.4 m wide and 7.5 m high while Vikramaditya 's hangar is reported as 22.5 m wide.
The images show the section at the head of the smaller of the four building docks at the Changxing Island facility. The dock is 360 m long and 80 m wide. Aside from constructing warships, Jiangnan currently has a large order book of over 70 merchant ships across its three facilities.
By using this dock, the shipyard may be trying to limit any potential impacts on the carrier's build time of having to share with civilian vessels under construction. This would have been the case if one of the three larger docks at Changxing Island had been used.
The images may also help to explain recent CSIC announcements, which sources in China have said may be linked to the carrier programme. CSIC suspended trading on 16 May and justified the move by saying it was in negotiations with government departments for an "unprecedented contract for military fitting" and so "did not want to distort the stock market". To "maintain fairness in information release", CSIC said it would cease trading until a major announcement in mid-August.
The images are also supported by the existence of a scale model of the Jiangnan yard at Changxing that was unveiled in 2009 and displayed an aircraft carrier in a dry dock. In the same year, the shipyard put up a banner announcing it had "the determination, confidence, and capability to take on China's first large-scale surface warship!", while in 2010, more than 200 high-ranking PLAN officers visited the yard.
In 2011 Reuters quoted a high-ranking Chinese political figure as saying that two carriers were being built at the yard. In the same year, He Guoqiang, a standing member of the Chinese Communist Party's politburo, visited Jiangnan and stressed the need for "innovation and conquering hurdles in key technologies".
However, in April 2013 Rear Admiral Song Xue, deputy chief of staff of the PLAN, told foreign defence attaches that China's next carrier "will be larger and carry more fighter [aircraft]" but denied that construction was under way at Changxing
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