China’s carriers push into US-dominated waters

As China girds for a deepening global rivalry with the United States, Beijing is testing how far its navy can operate from home, and how well its warships can work together on the open seas. In recent exercises involving two aircraft carriers, China gave a bold display of how it seeks to assert dominance in the western Pacific.

From late May and for much of June in seas near Japan, the two Chinese carriers — the Liaoning and the Shandong — practiced takeoffs and landings of fighter jets and helicopters, as many as 90 or more times on some days, according to reports from the Japanese military’s joint staff. Each carrier was protected by several warships.

The exercises, which caused Japan to express “serious concerns,” were a template for how China could use a growing collection of aircraft carriers to project armed power into the Pacific and try to overawe Asian neighbours aligned with Washington.

This was the first time that two Chinese carriers had ventured together past the “first island chain” — the barrier of islands east of China that includes the Japanese island of Okinawa, where US Marines are based, and Taiwan — and toward Guam, a US military hub, said Christopher Sharman, the director of the China Maritime Studies Institute at the US Naval War College. Guam is part of what is called the “second island chain,” which stretches from Tokyo to south of Palau.

The Chinese naval activities near or past the second island chain signal that US forces “operating in the vicinity of Guam could be at greater risk,” Sharman said.

“These aircraft carrier operations are a harbinger of what is to come,” said Sharman, a former US Navy attaché in Beijing. China “wants its carriers to be capable of operating independently at remote locations from the mainland, in both peacetime and wartime,” he said. “That means training for longer periods of time and at increasing distances from China.”

China’s navy said last month that the two carriers and accompanying warships were practicing “far-sea defence and joint operations.” The two carrier groups also squared off against each other in a simulated confrontation, said Xinhua, China’s official news agency. Some jet fighters that took off from the carriers flew perilously close to Japanese surveillance aircraft, Japan’s defence ministry said.

The exercises were not just for show. Operating aircraft from carriers is demanding and risky, Sharman said. By training far out in the Pacific, the carriers and accompanying vessels gained “valuable operating experience in unfamiliar waters, thereby providing the crew with skills that are applicable to future operations elsewhere in the world,” he said.

In the coming years, China may deploy aircraft carriers and accompanying naval vessels to bolster its claims in the South China Sea or in territorial disputes with South Korea or Japan. China could also send carriers to more distant parts of the world as a show of force to defend its economic and security interests.

China has only one significant overseas military base, in Djibouti, but carriers give it “the option of carrying out myriad aviation missions anywhere its navy sails,” said Timothy R Heath, a senior researcher at RAND, an organisation that provides analysis for the Pentagon and other clients. “The most important routes are those to the Middle East along the Indian Ocean.”

Still, the carriers are not a guarantee of Chinese regional maritime dominance.

In a toe-to-toe confrontation between China and the United States, each side’s carriers could be vulnerable to the other’s torpedoes or missiles. Given those risks, carriers may play a limited role, at least initially, in any potential clash over Taiwan, the self-governed island that China claims as its territory, several military experts said. And because Taiwan is close to mainland China’s coast and its many air bases, the aircraft carriers would not be crucial for trying to dominate the skies in a war over the island, said Oriana Skylar Mastro, a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University who studies Chinese military strategy.

China could send its carriers farther out into the Pacific to fend off US forces steaming to Taiwan’s aid, though the carriers would then be much more exposed to US attacks, Mastro said.

But China could also deploy the carriers as part of an effort to choke Taiwan off from the world.

“Chinese aircraft carriers will be useful in imposing a blockade on Taiwan,” said Narushige Michishita, a professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo who studies China’s military. “Aircraft carriers can surveil large areas and put coercive pressure on both military and commercial ships and aircraft.”

China now has three carriers, all running on diesel and generally less advanced than the United States’ 11 nuclear-powered carriers. By 2040, China may have six carriers, according to US Navy estimates. China appears to be building a fourth carrier, which analysts say may use nuclear power. That would give it far greater range without the need to refuel.

Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, appears to have decided that the country must have more carriers, and other big military assets, to cement its position as a global power. After the two Chinese carriers finished training in the Pacific this month, one of them, the Shandong, docked in Hong Kong, and selected members of the public were allowed to tour the vessel.

“Politically, they are one of the ultimate status symbols for a country,” Heath said of aircraft carriers. China’s enthusiastic publicity about the carrier manoeuvres in the Pacific indicated that its “leadership highly values the political symbolism of owning such a powerful warship,” Heath said.

Decades ago, Chinese leaders had resisted acquiring aircraft carriers, deciding that they were too costly at a time when China’s economy was much smaller.

That began to change after 1996, when the United States deployed two carrier battle groups to the waters near Taiwan to deter Beijing from further escalating tensions with the island. China had been firing ballistic missiles near Taiwan’s main ports, hoping to scare voters inclined to support President Lee Teng-hui, who Beijing saw as pushing pro-independence policies.

Two years after that crisis, a Chinese businessman bought a rusting, unfinished ex-Soviet carrier that was owned by Ukraine. China later bought and finished the ship, which debuted in 2012 as its first carrier, called the Liaoning. These days, budget limits are not such a worry for China’s navy. But its leaders are not rushing headlong into carrier expansion.

The Shandong — China’s second carrier and its first built at home — was launched in 2017. The latest, the Fujian, was launched in 2022 and has still not been placed into active service. The Fujian uses an electromagnetic catapult system to launch aircraft, which is more technically challenging than using a deck with a ski slope-like ramp, but makes it possible to fly heavier, better-armed planes.

“Chinese carrier operations are still in a rudimentary phase,” Michishita said. China, he said, is “taking a steady step-by-step approach to improve their capabilities.”

Meanwhile, China has entered a new era of ocean exploration. Its top leader, Xi Jinping, has pushed to make China a maritime power — with a world-class navy, the largest deep-sea fishing fleet, and an interest in extracting minerals from the seabed. He wants China’s research abilities to match those ambitions. China’s scientific research ships are ranging farther and probing deeper, gathering information that could expand understanding of marine life and the impact of climate change. But their findings could also serve China’s naval interests, including how it might deploy its submarines in the Pacific or try to track stealthier US ones.