Grainy photos of what appears to be a slice of the PLA Navy's first indigenously built aircraft carrier have been flying around the Internet the past few days. Of their veracity I have little doubt. China's leadership has openly proclaimed its plans to put a modest fleet of flattops to sea in the coming years. Chinese shipyards have adopted the Western practice of modular construction, meaning that they build the hull in sections, including many of the systems that make an inert hulk a living, fighting ship. They then bolt the sections together, lower the hull into the water, and add the superstructure and the rest of the equipment afterward. This speeds things up while adding efficiency to the shipbuilding process.
When I was a whippersnapper of a Naval Diplomat, I remember watching Aegis cruisers undergoing assembly at Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and thinking that was a pretty nifty way to do things. Evidently the PLA Navy agrees.
A couple of years back, when Beijing made its aircraft-carrier aspirations official, the fine folks at Foreign Policy asked me to explain why a historic land power like China cared about flattops. Being a bear of small brain, I reached into my mental bag of tricks and came up with Thucydides' claim that fear, honor, and interest are three of the prime movers for human actions. Beijing feared U.S. containment, a relic of the Cold War; saw an opportunity to recoup honor lost during the century of humiliation at the hands of the imperial powers; and hoped to add to the naval power it was amassing to advance China's interests in maritime Asia.
Read the full story at The Diplomat