China's Aircraft Carrier is hidden as Research vessel?

Research and training vessel will not change defense strategy, report Hu Yinan and Li Xiaokun in Beijing.

China is making use of an obsolete aircraft carrier that was bought from Ukraine and is being refitted for scientific research and training purposes, a top military spokesman said on Wednesday.

"The warship has no problem with sailing since it has been docked in the sea, and the time for its maiden experimental voyage depends on the schedule of the refit," Defense Ministry spokesman Geng Yansheng said, referring to the Varyag in the northeastern port of Dalian.

The pursuit of an aircraft carrier program would not change the navy's strategy of inshore defense, he said at a news briefing in Beijing.

"Training for carrier-borne aircraft pilots is also in progress," Geng said.

He did not specify who would be named the Varyag's commander. The official China Defense Newspaper earlier quoted media reports as saying Li Xiaoyan, 50, and Bai Yaoping, 49, were widely seen as top candidates for the post.

Li and Bai are both 1990 graduates of the Chinese military's first course - a three-year program, and the only one so far - to train aircraft carrier captains.

Geng's announcement came days after an article in the Study Times, the official newspaper of the Central Party School of the Communist Party of China, said the Varyag may soon start sea trials.

The article on Monday referred to the carrier as "China's first aircraft carrier training vessel, Shilang". Shi Lang was a 17th century admiral who reclaimed Taiwan for the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

Xinhua News Agency, though, said on Wednesday that the warship is still unnamed.

It is set to receive final adjustments at a shipyard in Dalian "before embarking on its maiden voyage", Xinhua said.

The ex-Soviet Varyag, which remained incomplete when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, was bought for $20 million in 1998. Ukraine disarmed it and removed its engines before selling the craft to China. The vessel, delivered in 2002, has been undergoing refitting work at Dalian since 2005.

China is the last permanent member of the United Nations Security Council to get an aircraft carrier. Among the other four, the US boasts 11 and the UK, France and Russia each has one in operation.

In Asia, India and Thailand each bought and commissioned an aircraft carrier - in the late 1980s and 1990s, respectively.

"China will inevitably start far behind India's level of expertise in actual carrier aviation and operation," Andrew S. Erickson and Andrew R. Wilson, professors of strategy at the US Naval War College, wrote in 2006 in the Naval War College Review.

Much to safeguard

As the world's largest exporter, second-largest economy and a massive importer of energy, China has to protect its 14,000 km of island coastline and a maritime area of 4.73 million sq km, military officials say.

Nine-tenths of all global trade and two-thirds of all petroleum are transported by sea, figures from the US navy show.

China has the largest maritime landmass among all Asia-Pacific countries. Its mainland coastline is 18,000 km long, compared with Thailand's 3,219 km, India's 6,083 km and the United States' 19,924 km.

Coastal land makes up just 14 percent of the country's land mass, but it supports 44.7 percent of the population and generates 60 percent of GDP, according to Xue Guifang, a professor at Law of the Sea Institute of the Ocean University of China in Shandong province.

Having an aircraft carrier is a necessity for the country, sources close to the military say.

A carrier would facilitate protecting China's own maritime trade and contributing to United Nations peacekeeping missions as a responsible power, said Han Bin, a student in Tsinghua University's department of precision instruments and mechanology and a self-proclaimed military fan.

 

Citing the deployment of the world's smallest aircraft carrier, Thailand's Chakri Naruebet, on several disaster relief operations, Zhang Xusan, former deputy commander of the Navy of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), said that carriers' "non-war applications" are playing an increasingly important role.

A slow process

The first Chinese proposal for an aircraft carrier dates to 1928. That idea was submitted to the then Kuomintang government by UK-trained Chen Shaokuan, then China's naval commander, but was rejected in 1929.

Chen made two more detailed requests between then and 1945. But his hopes faded as war, chaos and starvation dominated China's interest.

After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Premier Zhou Enlai and naval commander Xiao Jinguang supported the development of aircraft carriers. An initial feasibility study was conducted in 1970, but it took decades before China started to refit the Varyag and consider building a carrier.

Prior to acquiring Varyag, China had bought three decommissioned aircraft carriers to study. Two of them, the former Russian carriers Minsk and Kiev, have been turned into theme parks. The other, former Australian carrier Melbourne, was bought as scrap and taken apart in the mid-1980s.

Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said earlier this month that "there can be a gap" in attempts to match the capability of an aircraft carrier against the "great symbolism" that is inherent in having one.

Chen Bingde, chief of the PLA General Staff Department, said much of China's military technology is similar to what the US was using two to three decades ago.

The Gerald R. Ford and John F. Kennedy carriers of the US, which are being built, feature a new nuclear power plant, electromagnetic catapults and improved weapons movement. The Varyag is a steam-powered, ski jump-style, medium-sized vessel of the Kuznetsov class, developed in the Soviet era.

Recent reports have said the US navy is weighing a delay of the $10.3 billion Kennedy carrier amid mounting budget pressure.

"Being extremely capital intensive, building an aircraft carrier task force requires both long-term heavy investments and also access to advanced technologies," wrote Swaran Singh, a research fellow for the India-based Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses.

Geng, the Defense Ministry spokesman, said on Wednesday that the Varyag project embodies the capability of China's defense technology and will promote the modernization of the PLA.

The ship will be equipped with indigenous Chinese engines, ship-borne aircraft, radar and other hardware, said Cao Weidong, a researcher with the PLA Navy's Academic Research Institute.

The carrier might carry the J-15 fighter, the JT-9 naval trainer and the Z-8 helicopter, according to postings on websites including Xinhuanet, and People's Daily and China Central Television's forums.

Its first task

Aircraft carriers present large, vulnerable targets for an adversary, said Li Qinggong, deputy secretary of the China Council for National Security Policy Studies.

That was one of the forefront issues raised by people who supported development of new types of submarines, which are much more flexible in combat. Whether it makes sense for China to develop an aircraft carrier at all was the subject of a long-running debate.

The carrier project was postponed once and again, and it took years before it was approved.

"To modernize our national defense and build a perfect weaponry and equipment system, we cannot but consider the development of aircraft carriers," Liu Huaqing, vice-chairman of the country's Central Military Commission between 1989-97, wrote in his 2004 memoir.

Liu, credited as "the father of Chinese aircraft carriers", died in January.

Debates over their utility and roles "are just a tip of the iceberg in the mounting tasks facing aircraft carriers. . . . That's why we attach huge importance to the first carrier's role as a platform for scientific research and staff training," Li said.

One of the reasons it has taken authorities so long to refit the Varyag and confirm its status with the media, he said, is Beijing's hope that major powers and China's neighbors can, over time, understand the country's need to protect its maritime interests without making anyone nervous.

The reconstruction of the aircraft carrier is a long-term project and will have a long way to go before the warship can become operational, spokesman Geng said.

"Both overestimation and underestimation of China's future aircraft carrier have been wrong,"

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China builds 2 Aircraft carriers for South China Sea - armaments' upgrade

China is building 2 indigenous aircraft carriers as part of a broad modernization program that has rattled nerves regionally, sources said on Wednesday, as the government confirmed it was refitting an old Soviet carrier for training.

China is ramping up military spending as the United States discusses cutting its defense budget, though the Washington still far outspends China on security and is much more technologically advanced.

President Hu Jintao has made the navy a keystone of China's military ramp-up, and the carriers will be among the most visible signs of the country's rising military prowess.

"Two aircraft carriers are being built at the Jiangnan shipyard in Shanghai," one source with ties to China's Communist Party leadership told Reuters, requesting anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the program.

The Defense Ministry has only confirmed the existence of one carrier, which was bought from Ukraine in 1998 and was once destined to become a floating casino.

That will be used for training and research purposes, ministry spokesman Geng Yansheng said, seeking to reassure other countries that China would stick to its defensive military policy.

But he said China it had a right to protect its extensive maritime territory and coast.

"This is the sacred responsibility of China's armed forces," Geng said, in a statement carried on the ministry's website (www.mod.gov.cn).

"Building a carrier is extremely complex. We are currently refitting an old aircraft carrier, to be used for research and testing," Geng said.

"An aircraft carrier is a weapons platform; it can be used for offensive or defensive purposes. It can also be used to maintain global peace and for rescue and relief work," he added.

While Geng gave no timetable for starting sea trials, he said pilots were being trained to operate from the carrier.

Sources with ties to the Communist Party and the military said that ship would likely be based in the southern island province of Hainan, which sits atop of the vital trade lanes of the sensitive South China Sea.

The news comes as China has been flexing its muscles more aggressively in those waters, where a territorial dispute with Taiwan and several nearby countries, including Vietnam and the Philippines, has festered for years.

Geng said the timing "had nothing to do" with the tension there, though the message will be clear to many in Asia.

"China can now project its power to even further away from its coastline," said

Alexander Huang, professor of strategic studies at Taiwan's Tamkang University.

"That will have significant security implications to forces operating in the Western Pacific, including the U.S., Japan and Australia, so this is a watershed development. "

The carrier will add to regional concerns about China's military modernization and arms build-up. Defense spending is rising fast, and Beijing continues to test new high-tech equipment, including a stealth fighter.

"China's next moves have to be watched carefully, or there eventually could be a negative impact on maritime safety in Asia," said Yoshihiko Yamada, a professor at Japan's Tokai University.

Xinhua news agency said it was the first time the government had confirmed it was pursuing a carrier program.

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The old Soviet carrier's refitting has been one of China's worst-kept military secrets. Pictures of it sitting in Dalian harbor have circulated on Chinese websites for months, and it has been widely discussed in state media.

China would be the third Asian country to have a carrier after India and Thailand, but it will take time before it can go to sea in Asian waters that have largely been the domain of the U.S. navy since World War Two.

"It will be a long while before China develops a fully-fledged carrier capability, it will take a long time to train the necessary crews ... it may be up to decade until China has carrier capability," said Tim Huxley, director for defense and military analysis at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore.

For Beijing, the rationale of an aircraft carrier is more than just about modernizing a navy whose most notable engagements of the past few years have been skirmishes in the South China Sea with some of the other claimant nations.

Sending naval vessels further afield, to the waters off Somalia to fight pirates, and through the southern Japanese islands, has also partly been about ensuring trade routes are protected.

Yet China frets about the powerful U.S. military presence close to its shores, in particular U.S. bases in Japan and South Korea, and Washington's close but unofficial ties with Taiwan, the self-ruled island Beijing claims as its own.

"Aircraft carriers are essential for China primarily to defend its territory and territorial waters and bring a semblance of parity among the world's big powers," Wang Baokun, a defense studies professor at Beijing's Renmin University, wrote in the China Daily earlier this month.

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