Fujian aircraft carrier: China’s launches third and most advanced carrier

Matthew Funaiole, senior fellow at the CSIS’s China Project, told CNN previously that the new ship would be the Chinese military’s “first foray into a modern aircraft carrier.”

“This is a pretty significant step forward,” he said. “They’ve really committed to building out a carrier program, and they continue to push the boundaries of what they’re able to do.”

China’s ruling Communist Party claims sovereignty over the self-ruling democracy of Taiwan, despite having never governed it. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has repeatedly said that “reunification” between China and Taiwan is inevitable and refused to rule out the use of force.

China now wields the largest naval force in the world, and aircraft carriers are the core vessels of any major power’s fleet. The massive ships are essentially a mobile airbase, allowing for the rapid, long-term deployment of aircraft and weaponry to a combat theater.

Naval rivalry

China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, was an unfinished Soviet-era vessel that Beijing bought from Ukraine in 1998, updated and finally commissioned in 2012.

The Chinese military used the technological knowledge it gained from that vessel to build its first domestically constructed carrier, the Shandong, which entered service in December 2019.

But although China’s two initial aircraft carriers increased its naval power, their capability was still far behind the US, which has a total of 11 of the vessels in service.

In addition, both the Liaoning and the Shandong were based on outdated Soviet technology. Those two carriers used the ski-jump launching system, where planes would simply take off from a slight ramp, while US carriers use a more advanced catapult system to launch their…