Report: China To Build 2 Carriers By 2015

[livvy]

Chinese Navy sailors march past a warship at port before leaving for the Navy's first oversea operation from Sanya, southern China's Hainan province Dec. 26. On Friday, warships armed with special forces, missiles and helicopters will sail for anti-piracy duty off the coast of Somalia. This was the first time the communist nation has sent ships on a mission that could involve fighting so far beyond its territorial waters.


Report: China To Build 2 Carriers By 2015

By Philip Ewing - Staff writer
Posted : Saturday Jan 3, 2009 9:19:51 EST

China plans to begin building two aircraft carriers next year, a Japanese newspaper reported Wednesday, in what would be its first attempt at fixed-wing naval aviation and a potentially major new variable in the strategic calculus of the Pacific.

The two flattops each would be between 50,000 and 60,000 tons, be conventionally powered and patrol the South China Sea, according to the report in Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper, which cited Chinese “shipbuilding sources.” The carriers could be in the fleet by 2015, the story said.

China is one of the world’s largest builders of commercial ships, although its biggest indigenous warship so far has been no more than about 17,000 tons. The Asahi Shimbun reported that the carriers would be built at a new shipyard outside Shanghai and include components already on order from Russia.

A Chinese naval officer told the newspaper that one of the carriers’ primary missions would be to guard the sea lanes that connect energy-ravenous China with oil and mineral resources in the Middle East and Africa.

The story is the latest in a series of reports from around the world about Chinese ambitions to field an aircraft carrier. The official People’s Liberation Army Daily newspaper reported in September that 50 pilots from the Dalian Naval Academy were training for “ship borne aircraft flight.” Official Russian press agencies reported in October that China had purchased as many as 50 Su-33 Flanker-D fighter jets, an updated version of the Su-27K carried aboard Russia’s sole aircraft carrier. Since then, British and American news agencies have quoted top Chinese officials as expressing great interest in seaborne airpower.

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http://www.navytimes.com/news/2009/01/navy_china_carriers_010309w/%2e

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