Smoke rising from the chimney of a huge warship moored at Jiangnan Shipyard in Shanghai this month was the clearest sign yet that the Fujian, China’s newest aircraft carrier, was getting ready to sail.
After sheds on the warship’s deck were dismantled over the past few months, “it has started testing its propulsion system”, said Hsu Yen-chi, a researcher at the Council on Strategic and Wargaming Studies think-tank in Taipei.
The ship, China’s third aircraft carrier and the first designed domestically, marks a leap in Beijing’s pursuit of projecting armed force far beyond its shores — part of leader Xi Jinping’s goal of making the People’s Liberation Army a “world-class military” by the middle of the century.
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