The great Chinese aircraft carrier mystery

By Anthony Paul

FIRST there was the weird shooting of President Chen Shui-bian and his vice-president. This was followed by what Newsweek's cover, in a bizarre reach for an American angle on Mr Chen's narrow win, called 'Asia's Florida election'. Now, for devoted Internet scourers at least, the China-Taiwan story is becoming even stranger.

Military-minded netizens are abuzz with talk about the allegedly imminent appearance of a Chinese aircraft carrier. Actually, not just one, but three. One California-based news commentator, FreeRepublic.com ('pro-God, pro-life, pro-Bill of Rights, pro-gun... and pro-America'), warns that China, with the idea of seizing Taiwan in mind, is about to spring a 'technical surprise' on the world.

Several websites refer to 'eyewitness reports' of three graving docks at Shanghai, each with carrier construction under way. First mention appears to have come in a lengthy report on the 'Strong Nation Forum' (Qiangguo Luntan), an Internet bulletin board run by the People's Daily Online. It quoted from an article in 'a Russian newspaper, The Independent', headlined 'China's future route to maritime dominance'.

The latest carrier rumours have caught the attention of America's full, frenetic political spectrum: A detailed account also appeared on a website far to the left of any pro-gun posse - the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), an arms-control advocacy group.

The FAS report quotes an 'article published in China' that claimed that one of the shipyards was expected to complete the first 48,000-ton carrier, currently named 'Project 9935', this year. All three ships, claimed the FAS item, 'could be operational with battle groups by 2008-2010'.

The modern People's Liberation Army Navy (Plan) is largely the creation from the 1960s of one of modern China's most powerful generals, Liu Huaqing. He laid down a much-quoted 'blue-and-green water' strategic doctrine.

At first, China should develop a 'green-water active defence': It would protect relatively shallow, thus 'green', territorial waters and enforce China's sovereignty claims in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea.

In the second phase, General Liu argued, the Plan should develop a 'blue-water navy' - capable of projecting power into the far blue yonder of the Pacific and Indian oceans.

Just before his retirement in 1997, Gen Liu published an article insisting that for this second stage, it was 'extremely necessary' for China, as it became a major trading power, to have carriers to protect its commercial sea lanes.

Reports that the Chinese have been listening to Gen Liu are by no means new or uncommon. Retired US Navy Captain Bernard D. Cole told me that he had repeatedly encountered references to China's interest in carriers during research into his book, The Great Wall At Sea: China's Navy Enters The 21st Century.

Said Capt Cole: 'I found reports of the navy's acquiring carriers as far back as the 1960s. None of them turned out to be true.'

Nevertheless, China's carrier enthusiasts, over the years, did spend time and money on what one observer has described as 'tyre-kicking' - spasmodic studies of Western and Russian carrier technology.

In 1985, China bought the 15,000-ton British-built, former Royal Australian Navy carrier, HMAS Melbourne. Ostensibly the purchase was for scrap, but the Chinese reportedly used its steam-catapult-equipped flight deck for flight training at a North China airfield.

In 1992, the Plan showed interest in buying the Varyag, a partly completed 65,000-tonne carrier that the Ukraine had inherited in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse. Though that early deal fell through (reportedly as a consequence of pressure on Kiev from Washington and Tokyo), Varyag eventually ended up in a naval yard in Dalian, North China, in 2002.

China has also been the final berth for the 43,000-tonne carrier Minsk.

This former proud flagship of the Soviet Pacific Fleet is now the centrepiece of Minsk World, an amusement park at Shenzhen, near Hong Kong.

A sister ship, Kiev, has gone through a similar transformation into a floating museum and convention centre in Tianjin.

Clearly, despite the Soviet carriers' obsolescence, the Chinese military must have felt that they had something to learn from these carcasses: The US$20 million (S$34 million) paid for Varyag was three times its value as scrap.

So are any lessons that the Plan learnt currently guiding Shanghai's naval architects? Is a Chinese 'technical surprise' just around the corner?

Retired US Navy Rear-Admiral Eric McVadon, a former naval attache in Beijing, told me that the most suspicious thing about the latest report of a 'green-water carrier' is that it contains 'too much detail' - the type of turbines, boilers, radar and so on.

'We've had good reporting about China's work on destroyers, subs, frigates, but nothing official on a carrier near Shanghai,' said Admiral McVadon. 'So if there's a carrier - in fact, not one but three - that we've missed, well that's big news. But there's too much detail here for me to believe it.

'If China's immediate goal is Taiwan, everything the Chinese Navy has been doing about their destroyers, subs and frigates makes sense. This carrier does not make sense. If you put a carrier like this to sea, you're just going to give the US Navy an attractive target.'

So the region can relax about the prospect of Chinese carrier battle groups sharing the Pacific with the US Navy's?

For the moment, probably yes. But one last word from Admiral McVadon on his first reaction to this latest report: 'I told myself, 'I don't really believe this is credible, but one of these days we'll have a report that will be'.'

Straits Times (Singapore)