China launches new aircraft carrier Fujian
INTERNATIONAL – ASIA
8 NOVEMBER 2025
- China has commissioned its latest aircraft carrier after extensive sea trials.
- China has the world’s largest navy and is expanding its power farther beyond its own waters.
- Fujian has been commissioned at a naval base on southern China’s Hainan island in a ceremony attended by President Xi Jinping.
- The Fujian is China’s third carrier and the first that it both designed and built itself.
- For China’s navy, one goal is to dominate the near waters of the South China Sea, East China Sea and Yellow Sea around the so-called First Island Chain, which runs south through Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines.
- But deeper into the Pacific, it also wants to be able to contest control of the Second Island Chain, where the U.S. has important military facilities on Guam and elsewhere,.
- China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, was Soviet-made and its second, the Shandong, was built in China but based on the Soviet model.
- Both use older-style ski-jump type systems to help planes take flight.
- The Fujian skips past the steam catapult technology used on most American carriers to employ an electromagnetic launch system found only on the latest U.S. Navy Ford-class carriers.
- The system causes less stress to the aircraft and the ship, allows for more precise control over speed and can launch a wider range of aircraft than the steam system.
- Numerically it only has three carriers compared to the U.S. Navy’s 11, and while China’s carriers are all conventionally powered, the U.S.’s are all nuclear powered — they can operate almost indefinitely without being refuelled, increasing their range.
