"While fighter planes and submarines are pawns in China’s opening gambit in the contest for the South China Sea, Beijing hopes one day to at least check (if not checkmate) Washington with a growing armada of aircraft carriers, the modern dreadnoughts in this latter-day game of empires. After acquiring an unfinished Soviet Kuznetsov-class carrier from Ukraine in 1998, the naval dockyard at Dalian retrofitted the rusting hulk and launched it in 2012 as the Liaoning, China’s first aircraft carrier. That hull was already 30 years old, an age that would normally have assured such a warship a place in some scrap metal yard. Though not combat capable, it was a platform for training China’s first generation of naval aviators in landing speeding jets on heaving decks in high seas. In marked contrast to the 15 years needed to retrofit this first ship, the Dalian yards took just five years to construct, from the keel up, a much-improved second carrier capable of full combat operations.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/mi...cond-aircraft-carrier-is-its-most-crucial-yet
The narrow hulls and ski-jump prows that limit these first two carriers to just 24 “Flying Shark” fighter planes won’t hold for the country’s third carrier, now being built from indigenous designs in Shanghai.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a15392390/chinas-next-aircraft-carrier-002
When launched next year, it will be able to carry on-board fuel reserves that will give it a longer cruising range and a complement of 40 aircraft, as well as electromagnetic systems for faster launches. Thanks to an accelerating tempo of training, technology, and construction, by 2030 China should have enough aircraft carriers to ensure that the South China Sea will become what the Pentagon has termed a “Chinese lake.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/world/asia/china-south-china-sea-radar.html
Such carriers are the vanguard of a sustained naval expansion that, by 2017, had already given China a modern navy of 320 ships, backed by land-based missiles, jet fighters, and a global system of surveillance satellites.
(PDF Document)
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33153.pdf
Its current anti-ship ballistic missiles have a range of 2,500 miles and so could strike U.S. Navy vessels anywhere in the Western Pacific. Beijing has also made strides in mastering the volatile technology for hypersonic missiles with speeds of up to 5,000 miles per hour, making them impossible to stop.
https://www.popsci.com/china-hypersonic-double-wing-aircraft-i-plane
By building two new submarines every year, China has already assembled a fleet of 57, both diesel- and nuclear-powered, and is projected to reach 80 soon.
(PDF Document)
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33153.pdf
Each of its four nuclear submarines carries 12 ballistic missiles that could reach anywhere in the western United States. In addition, Beijing has launched dozens of amphibious ships and coastal corvettes, giving it naval dominance in its own waters.
(PDF Document)
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33153.pdf
Within just five years, according to the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, China “will complete its transition” from the coastal force of the 1990s to a modern navy capable of “sustained blue water operations” and “multiple missions around the world,” including full-spectrum warfare.
(PDF Document)
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33153.pdf
In other words, China is forging a future capacity to control its “home” waters from the East China Sea to the South China Sea. In the process, it will become the first power in 70 years to challenge the U.S. Navy’s dominion over the Pacific basin."