On Friday, Chinese media reported that the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has officially taken its third aircraft carrier, the Fujian, into service at a naval base on the southern Chinese island of Hainan. The state news agency Xinhua said the commissioning ceremony had been held on Wednesday, with Chinese President Xi Jinping in attendance. International reactions have been guarded. Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary and former defense minister Minoru Kihara said that Japan was observing China’s military activity and would respond "calmly but decisively " if necessary. Fujian is also the name of the Chinese coastal province facing the island of Taiwan in the South China Sea.
In numbers, China has the world’s largest navy, with over 700 warships and submarines, and over 1,000 active vessels. In comparison, the US Navy has just over 200 active ships. But in terms of aircraft carriers, the imbalance is reversed: The US Navy has 11 aircraft carriers in total, compared to China’s three. All of them are nuclear powered. But China has been working to close this gap, constructing new warships at a pace the US has not been able to match. "They’re fielding and building more aircraft carriers, they’re fielding more nuclear-powered subs, they are fielding more, larger destroyers and other vessels that carry a larger number of missiles," the deputy director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Brian Hart, told AP. But Singapore-based analyst an aerospace engineer Tang Meng Kit told the AP news agency, "it is possible that China’s capabilities are overstated, " and argued that well-choreographed parades displaying modern weaponry did not translate into actual combat-readiness. "Real-world operational readiness lags behind its showcased arsenal," he said.
#ChinaNavy #AircraftCarrier #fujian
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