China’s Aircraft Carrier Ambitions: The Numbers Game

The defined goal of China, which has been widely analysed, is to achieve ‘the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’ by 2049, and the road to that would go through periods of cooperation and, later, confrontation with its main trading partners, that is, the USA and the rest of the democratic world, effectively changing the established world order as per their understanding.1 Considering the vast coastline of 18,000 km2 that China is blessed with and needs to defend, as well as the heavy dependence upon its maritime routes of mercantile communication, it is inevitable that China would need to become a maritime superpower to achieve its great rejuvenation.

In its quest towards achieving supremacy in the maritime domain, China has embarked on a journey of modernising its maritime fleet, which includes an Aircraft Carrier programme, the aim being to have the numbers to counter inimical agencies and States, specifically the USA and its allies in the Pacific and the Indian Oceans. At the time of writing this article, China has two functional aircraft carriers, with the third in the final stages of production. However, are these numbers adequate? In its need to achieve supremacy at sea, how many aircraft carriers does China need?

This article endeavours to arrive at a figure through comparison with the Japanese Mobile Force, the ‘Kido Butai’, which wreaked havoc during the Pacific War from 1941 to 1942. The article compares the forces in play during World War II with the current scenario, and tries to draw conclusions as to the likely numbers that China must have to achieve the necessary devastating effects in the case of a war in the future in the Indo-Pacific.

The comparison with that specific era has been drawn considering the similarity in the geo-strategic conundrum faced by Imperial Japan as well as the technological parity that Japan held with the US Navy at that time. Through this research, it is hoped that a few lessons may be learnt which would be relevant for Indian maritime strategy to become more contemporaneous.