China building second aircraft carrier

A senior Communist Party official in northeastern China said that China was at work on a home-built aircraft carrier and had plans to operate a fleet of at least four of the vessels, a Hong Kong newspaper reported.

The comments by Wang Min, the party secretary of Liaoning Province, are an official indication of what outside observers have long predicted: that China’s commissioning of a refurbished aircraft carrier in 2012 was only a first step in its effort to develop its capacity to build and sail its own aircraft carriers.

According to the Hong Kong-based Ta Kung Pao, Mr. Wang said on Saturday that China’s second aircraft carrier was being built at a shipyard in the coastal city of Dalian and should be completed in six years. The newspaper has ties to the Communist Party, although it is not an official mouthpiece.

China’s first aircraft carrier, named Liaoning for the city where it was refurbished, was purchased from Ukraine and towed to China, where it underwent years of work before joining the Chinese fleet in 2012. Late last year, while on exercises in the South China Sea, a Chinese support vessel sailing with the Liaoning had a near collision with a United States Navy cruiser, the Cowpens, that had apparently been monitoring the Chinese flotilla.

The Ta Kung Pao report has since been removed from the newspaper’s website, and reposts carried on the websites of domestic Chinese media outlets have also been deleted.

Other mainland media sought to downplay Mr. Li’s statement. News of China’s aircraft carrier “isn’t worth fussing over,” Li Jie, a professor at the People’s Liberation Army’s Naval Military Studies Research Institute, wrote in Global Times, a newspaper run by the Communist Party’s People’s Daily Group.

Mr. Li argued that the United States, with 11 aircraft carriers, had attempted to play up China’s naval development as a threat. India, with two aircraft carriers and a third under construction, also has an advantage over China, he wrote. “We should confidently develop aircraft carriers and promptly respond to the outside world’s questions,” he wrote, “so that this ‘China threat theory’ won’t find a market in international society.”

Last year the United States Department of Defense predicted in its annual report on China’s military development that China would “likely build multiple aircraft carriers over the next decade,” with the first of those becoming operational before 2020.