Question: Which statement most accurately describes China's aircraft carrier, the Liaoning?

1. It is an important symbol of national pride to Chinese citizens.
2. It is a small training carrier that poses little or no threat to US–carrier strike groups in the Pacific.
3. The Liaoning can exert strong coercive pressure on other countries in the region like the Philippines and Vietnam.
4. All of the above.

There is no question China's aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, poses no direct danger to the United States. It is a relatively small carrier with little in the way of advanced electronics or weaponry, and, because of its short flight deck, it is launching under-equipped planes.

That said, many experts who have dismissed the carrier as nothing more than a symbol of national pride to the Chinese may be significantly underestimating its training value as China constructs several much-larger and quite-modern carriers.1

These same experts may also be missing the role of the Liaoning as a coercive tool as China seeks to resolve many outstanding territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas in its favor.

In fact, the story of the Liaoning reveals as much about Chinese deception as it does about China's global military intentions. It is a long and twisting tale that begins on December 4, 1988—the day the Soviet Union launched a brand-new aircraft carrier called the Riga.

Exactly a decade later, and seven years after the fall of the Soviet Union, that aircraft carrier, by then renamed the Varyag, sat as a rusting hull, stripped of its engine and rudder, wasting away in a Ukrainian shipyard. That's when a group of Chinese entrepreneurs purchased the carrier for the alleged purpose of turning it into a floating casino berthed in Macao.

Of course, this casino ruse hardly fooled the US State Department and the Pentagon—particularly because the shell company behind the deal was run by former Chinese-military officers. Moreover, the United States had seen this type of ruse before. After a similar Chinese front company purchased the Australian carrier HMS Melbourne allegedly for scrap in 1985, “the flight deck of the Melbourne was kept intact and used for pilot training in carrier takeoffs and landings.”2

Fig. 14.1. A Chinese Shenyang J-15 Flying Shark launches off the “ski jump” deck of China's first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning. It was bought “used” from the Ukraine under the ruse that it would become a floating casino in Macao. (Photograph from USNI News.)

To stop China from getting what could become its first operational aircraft carrier back to a Chinese shipyard for renovation, US officials quietly pressured Turkey to block the towing of the carrier through the Bosporus Strait. This pressure worked for over a year as the towed hull circled the Black Sea like Godot waiting for spiritual enlightenment. Eventually, however, a cash-strapped Turkey succumbed to the lure of Chinese inducements, and the ship was freed.3

After a perilous journey back to China—at one point the towed ship broke free in high winds and heavy seas—the carrier was refurbished and refitted in a Dalian, China, shipyard; it would complete its sea trials in January of 2014.⁴

Today, the Liaoning is indeed a great source of pride to the Chinese people. Its picture is everywhere, and everyone from little children to senior citizens love to mimic the iconic deckhand or “shooter” pose that signals each plane's takeoff.⁵

This is light years away from the 1970s when one Chinese official famously remarked: “China will never build an aircraft carrier. Aircraft carriers are tools of imperialism, and they're like sitting ducks waiting to be shot.”⁶

Today, the Liaoning has also come to be a great source of fear to nations like the Philippines and Vietnam—both of which are involved in contentious maritime disputes with China. As Heritage Foundation scholar Dean Cheng has noted:

When you look at the South China Sea and when you look at where various countries have their airfields and their air forces, what you can very quickly see is that much of the South China Sea is very far from land. So, as a result, if you put even a small aircraft carrier there, what you can create is something like an air defense bubble; and one of the lessons the Chinese have taken away from the wars of the past twenty years—Desert Shield, Desert Storm, the Balkans, Afghanistan—is that air superiority is essential to winning modern wars. You may not win with air superiority, but you will certainly lose without it; and so the ability to deploy an aircraft carrier, even if it is just to keep three or four modern aircraft overhead, is a huge advantage when everybody else in the area really can't put any aircraft overhead for any sustained period of time.⁷

As for the Liaoning's broader strategic value, it is true that the carrier lacks the sophisticated avionics and flight-control software of an American carrier. In addition, because it is a full football field in length shorter than American carriers, the planes that take off from its deck also cannot carry the full complement of weapons that American planes can.

That said, China looks to be playing the long game when it comes to establishing hegemony. That's because as a training carrier, the Liaoning fits in quite well with Admiral Liu Huaqing's original vision of global force projection by the Chinese navy by 2050.

At least based on the current frenetic activity in Chinese shipyards, it does indeed look like China will soon be fielding numerous modern carriers—along with the critically needed “picket ships” like cruisers and destroyers that make up an aircraft-carrier strike group and protect the carrier from all external threats.

To better understand the concept and role of “picket ships,” consider the typical American-carrier strike group. Besides the centerpiece aircraft carrier, it includes a multimission Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser tasked with the full complement of antisubmarine, antisurface ship, and antiaircraft warfare. To assist in this multimission purpose, the carrier strike group also includes two slightly smaller Arleigh Burke–class destroyers as well as the vaunted Aegis Combat System—an integrated naval weapons system designed to simultaneously track literally hundreds of incoming threats at any given time.

Now here's the broader point: If China had no intention of projecting its naval power globally, it would have little need for any of the very expensive capital ships that make up a carrier strike group. In fact, just the opposite is true as China is now building these capital ships at an alarming rate in shipyards up and down the coast of China.8

Of course, once China is able to field its own carrier strike groups, the possibility of conflict between China and the United States will likely increase—perhaps exponentially. This will be particularly true if China seeks to use its enhanced naval power to impose its will on lesser-equipped nations as it is already seeking to do with much success in the East and South China Seas.

Before leaving the topic of surface ships, it may be useful to move from big ships like destroyers and carriers to one of the smallest but most potent vessels in China's growing anti-access arsenal—its missile-carrying stealth catamarans. These Type 022 Houbei-class boats are barely fifty yards long, but they each carry two cruise missiles, travel at speeds close to 40 knots, and truly pack an out-sized punch.

In fact, China is churning these boats out in record numbers, and they fit quite well into Mao Zedong's aforementioned trademark strategy of “swarming.” For example, in an attack on an American-carrier strike group, a hundred of these catamarans moving at high speed toward the strike group might unleash their missiles in “salvo attacks” as the carrier group simultaneously comes under fire from antiship ballistic missiles, shore-based cruise missiles, and torpedoes and missiles fired by attack subs. No matter how good the American Aegis system is—and it has never really been tested by the types of swarming attacks China is rapidly developing the capabilities to mount—Aegis is likely to be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. This type of scenario once again recalls Josef Stalin's adage that “quantity has a quality of its own.”

What is perhaps ultimately most disturbing about China's missile catamarans is how China got the design in the first place. In fact, as with China's “Made in Europe” diesel-electric submarine fleet, the “dual use” technology for China's missile catamarans was likewise supplied by a putative friend and ally.

In this case, the Australian company AMD first sold a number of its catamarans to China strictly for civilian river, seaport, and ferry purposes.9 However, once these business ties were established, China coaxed AMD into a joint venture with a company in Guangzhou; it was this joint venture—Sea Bus International—that adapted the basic AMD design for military use. And so now we face the prospect of an Australian-designed Chinese catamaran powered by French diesel engines firing Russian-bought missiles at American, Japanese, or Vietnamese ships.¹⁰ Sometimes you just gotta not love the forces of globalization.