TAIPEI — Experts on China’s Navy are sounding cautionary tones after news surfaced last week that China is reportedly constructing a second aircraft carrier.

The Chinese-language report from Hong Kong-based Ta Kung Pao, known as a veteran pro-Beijing newspaper, stated that Wang Min, a Communist Party secretary of China’s northeastern province of Liaoning, has confirmed the construction of the ship, which unlike its first carrier, is homegrown.

China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, began life as the unfinished Ukrainian ship Varyag and was abandoned after the Soviet Union collapsed. Varyag was sold in 1998 for $20 million to a Hong Kong developer, ostensibly for refurbishment as a casino in Macao.

Instead of being towed there, it was towed to Dalian shipyard in northeastern China and refurbished. Commissioned in September 2012, the ship conducted flight tests with its first carrier-borne fighter jet, the J-15 Flying Shark.

According to Ta Kung Pao, Wang told delegates at the 12th Provincial People’s Congress last week that the first indigenously built aircraft carrier was under construction at the Dalian shipyard and would take six years to complete. Wang said the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) needs a total of four carriers by 2020.

“They’ll have to hurry if they are going to have four carriers by 2020, though,” said Roger Cliff, senior fellow with the Asia Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council.

“If, as Wang says, it takes six years to build one, then they would have to start three of them this year,” he said. “That’s not how the PLA Navy usually does things. Unless it is a copy of the Liaoning, I would expect them to build only one first, try it out, and see if they are satisfied with the design before building additional examples.”

Whether the PLAN is building four or 40, US analysts are saying that China needs to be taken seriously.

“It means that the PLA and the party are serious about operating carrier battle groups in the near and far seas by about 2020,” said Larry Wortzel, a senior member of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. “This was one of the goals for the PLAN, and it means that China can project power more effectively in the South China Sea.”

-snip-

Read more:http://www.navytimes.com/article/2014012...a-s-2nd-carrier