Almost a decade has passed since the People’s Liberation Army pulled the trigger on President Xi Jinping’s plans for a massive overhaul of the world’s biggest military. In the latest of a series on Chinese weapon systems, Seong Hyeon Choi looks at what China’s second aircraft carrier tells us about the PLA Navy’s blue water ambitions.
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The Shandong – which arrived in Hong Kong on Thursday for its inaugural five-day port call to the city – is the PLA Navy’s second aircraft carrier and its first to be built in China.
The carrier is escorted by the missile destroyers Yanan and Zhanjiang, along with the missile frigate Yuncheng, and will host a series of tours and cultural exchanges during its visit.
The Shandong’s homeport is in Hainan, southern China, where the carrier is in service with the navy’s Southern Theatre Command, which mainly operates near the South China Sea.
With a full-load displacement of 70,000 tonnes, the Shandong has become an instrument of Beijing’s long-range naval power projection across the island chains that have for decades marked the defensive boundaries of the United States and its allies in the Western Pacific.
Home-grown
The Shandong, commissioned in December 2019 and officially designated Type 002, kick-started China’s dual-carrier era. Its fellow carrier, the Liaoning, was reconstructed from a Soviet Kuznetsov-class vessel and delivered to the PLA Navy in 2012.