The PLA Navy has been reportedly seeking to acquire an aircraft carrier force as a part of its ambition to achieve a ‘blue-water’ naval capability for over a decade. Also it is generally believed that China has no financial or technological difficulties to build an aircraft carrier. However, despite various reports claiming that China may plan to refit one or more former Soviet Union’s aircraft carriers, or build carriers indigenously, no firm evidence has been found to show that such a plan has ever been initiated.
On the other hand, the aircraft carrier is of great importance to the PLA Navy’s power projection capabilities. Although China can already project military forces superior to those South-East Asian countries could deploy to the South China Sea, the PLA is still incapable of providing its forces in this region with credible air support. A fully operational aircraft carrier battle group could also shift the power balance in the Taiwan strait and the East Asia, and has implications for U.S. naval policy in Asia-Pacific region.
China’s ambition to build a ‘blue-water’ navy comprising aircraft carriers, large surface combatants and nuclear submarines can be traced back to the late 1950s, but the building of an aircraft carrier was not seriously considered until the early 1980s, when Admiral Liu Hua-Qing became the commander in chief of the PLA Navy, and later in the 1990s the vice chairman of the Central Military Commission (1989-97). Liu studied in Voroshilov Naval Academy in Leningrad, Soviet Union between 1954 and 1958, and became the driving force behind the transforming of the PLA Navy from a costal defence force to a regional naval force during his tenure.
Under the influence of Liu and other PLA Navy officers who strongly supported the ocean-going offensive strategy, in the early-1980s research institutes and think tanks within the PLA began to study the possibility of building a light aircraft carrier of around 15,000 to 20,000 tonne displacement and carrying helicopters and vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft such as Sea Harrier.
The aircraft carrier research programme was boosted when a Chinese ship breaker purchased the retired 15,000t aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne from Australia. The ship, which was stationed in a seaport in Guangzhou for five years before it was finally dismantled for scrap, provided a valuable opportunity for the Chinese shipbuilding engineers to see at first-hand how the ship was designed and built.
China was reported to have approached the Ukrainian and in 1992 to purchase the unfinished Soviet Kuznetsov-class carrier Varyag, but was refused. Later China approached the Russian government to purchase one of the four Russian navy’s 40,000t Kiev-class carriers, but the effort was unsuccessful too.
In 1995-96 the Spanish shipbuilder Empresa Nacional Bazan approached the Chinese government to promote its two low-cost, lightweight conventional take-off and landing (CTOL) aircraft carrier designs, the 23,000t SAC-200 and the 25,000t SAC-220. However, China was only interested in obtaining the design blueprint rather than ordering the actual vessel. At the end of 1995 it was reported that France had offered to sell China the 32,700t carrier Clemenceau, which was decommissioned in September 1997. Again the deal went nowhere.
Between 1998 and 2000, three ex-Soviet Navy aircraft carriers, the 45,000t class Kiev class Minsk and Kiev, and the 67,500t Kuznetsov class Varyag, were purchased by Chinese commercial companies. The two Kiev class carriers have been developed into floating tourism parks based in Shenzhen and Tianjin respectively. The third ship, Varyag, is currently receiving refit at Dalian Shipyard to become a floating casino in Macao according to its owner, a Hong Kong/Macao based private company. It is unknown that how much value these three vessels are of to the Chinese aircraft carrier research programme, but without a doubt they all have been carefully examined by Chinese shipbuilders to benefit the future indigenous aircraft carrier project.
According to China’s navy development plan in the early 21st century, the second layer of defence and sea-denial capabilities are designed to primarily to break a blockade of the first island chain by 2015 to 2020. The roles of the aircraft carrier in this strategy remains uncertain. In fact many within the PLA and PLA Navy suggest that the military importance of the aircraft carrier is much less than its political importance. They argued that other platforms such as nuclear attack submarines (SSNs) would be much more useful for the PLA Navy in the near future. Some are also concerned that without a sufficient air, sea, and underwater protections, the aircraft carrier is no more than a sitting duck in a modern sea warfare. As the focus of China’s military planning shifts to the Taiwan Strait, the acquisition of aircraft carriers seems to have lost whatever urgency it had.
