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By John Feng
China Editor
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A satellite photograph has captured China putting its newest aircraft carrier to sea in the same week the United States sends away its only flattop in the region to fight Iran, opening another “carrier gap” on the front line of America’s most important rivalry.
Since becoming China’s paramount leader in 2012, Xi Jinping has taken a personal interest in the development of the People’s Liberation Army Navy into a modern fighting force, whose first objective is to defeat the U.S. Navy within the Western Pacific’s first island chain, where the U.S. has long maintained a series of alliances to keep communist powers in check.
China’s long-term goal is to field a “world-class military” by the middle of the century, but it doesn’t have to displace America everywhere to cause serious pain—it only needs to keep U.S. interests in Asia further out of reach.
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China’s military modernization “is the top focus of U.S. defense planning and budgeting,” experts say. But Washington keeps finding an excuse to let Beijing close the gap on America, the only true global superpower.
The Forever Distraction
On Monday, when the European Space Agency’s Earth observation satellites snapped the Chinese aircraft carrier Fujian in the South China Sea, flight-tracking data suggested the USS Theodore Roosevelt was steaming toward the Indian Ocean only a few hundred miles to the east.
The Roosevelt will become the fifth U.S. flattop to deploy to the Middle East during the Iran war—after the USS Abraham Lincoln, the USS Gerald R. Ford, the USS George H.W. Bush and the USS George Washington—and it’s on course to reach the U.S. Central Command area later this month.
The Bush and the Washington remain in the Arabian Sea for now, and together with the Roosevelt will equal the record set this past spring for the largest carrier strike force in the region since the 2003 Iraq war. But for the third time in just over two years, a military crisis in the Middle East has forced the U.S. to confront a multiweek “carrier gap” in the Western Pacific.
The Roosevelt will relieve the Washington, allowing it to return to its forward homeport in Japan, but not before a period of overlap in which President Donald Trump is given additional strike options.
The U.S. Navy amphibious ready group led by the USS Boxer also is in the Indian Ocean, according to a tracker maintained by the U.S. Naval Institute-run USNI News.
Mind the Sea Gap
The U.S.’s 11 aircraft carriers are symbols of American power and a demonstration of industrial strength and geopolitical ambitions. China now has three of its own and Xi wants at least nine of the floating bases by 2035, according to the Pentagon.
The coercive weight of the flattop is one China’s leaders know well. In 1996, at the height of the Taiwan Strait crisis, the USS Independence and the USS Nimitz deterred Chinese forces during Taiwan’s first democratic presidential election and became the catalyst for Beijing’s modern warfighting plans against the U.S. military.
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When the Nimitz is decommissioned next spring, it will extend its record as the longest-serving carrier in U.S. Navy history, at over half a century, thanks in part to its nuclear reactors, which only need to be refueled once every 25 years.
The Chinese navy’s three aircraft carriers are all conventionally powered, but its fourth—currently under construction in Dalian in northeastern China—will have nuclear cores, according to the most recent assessments.
As a second mover, China has iterated on existing designs and leapfrogged older technologies. Its first two carriers were of Soviet design, but its third, the 80,000-ton Fujian, was a wholly domestic endeavor that integrated modern equipment like electromagnetic catapults and arresting gear.
The Fujian was launched at the Jiangnan Shipyard in Shanghai in 2022, commissioned by the Chinese navy one year ago, and is on course to achieve full operational readiness by the end of 2026. The exceptionally fast delivery timeline is evidence of Beijing’s effective strategy of military-civil fusion, especially in shipbuilding, an industry it dominates.
China’s share of global shipbuilding was more than 53 percent last year, compared the U.S.’s 0.11 percent in 2024 and “effectively none in 2025,” Matthew Funaiole, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, told the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on East Asia and the Pacific in July.
“The scale of China’s shipbuilding industry is difficult to overstate. A single state-owned conglomerate, the China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC), builds more commercial vessels by tonnage each year than the entire U.S. shipbuilding industry has produced since the end of World War II,” he said.
Funaiole assessed that Beijing was capitalizing on “foreign orders, foreign technology, and foreign capital flow…to support China’s maritime industrial base.”
Home Truths
Xi has been central to the Chinese navy’s growth as well as China’s wider plans to build and militarize artificial islands in the South China Sea, according to Ryan Martinson, an assistant professor at the China Maritime Studies Institute of the U.S. Naval War College.
“Xi’s efforts to build a powerful navy are predicated on a strong, personal belief in the vital importance of maritime power for China’s national ‘rejuvenation,’” Martinson wrote in June.
This week, the Fujian is one of two Chinese carriers active in the Western Pacific, with the flattop Liaoning last seen conducting joint force training in the Philippine Sea, beyond the first island chain—long seen as the main obstacle for a Chinese takeover of Taiwan.
Beijing’s designs on Taiwan, which require it to deter the U.S. and its allies nearby, have been known for years. The PLA has been slowly eroding the U.S. military’s advantages, even if America retains a decisive qualitative edge.
The Chinese naval fleet has outnumbered America’s for over a decade, but the U.S. has been operating aircraft carriers for over a century, while China began in 2012.
“China's rapid expansion in naval capabilities is remarkable, but its overall naval tonnage remains behind the U.S. and its naval forces do not have combat experience. This is an important asterisk,” Ryan Hass, a researcher at the Brookings Institution, said this week.
China is “a risen power” that “will not accept a subordinate status” to America, Hass said.
Trump is fixated on shipbuilding too. For the Arctic, the U.S. has tapped Finland to help build a fleet of polar icebreakers. In Maryland, a new U.S. shipyard—the largest since World War II—will see the U.S. Navy join forces with drone maker Anduril to produce submarine components for future warfare.
However, some say U.S. policymakers should recognize the Chinese military’s capability—and intent—to deal a heavy blow to U.S. forces cannot be solved by numbers alone.
Lyle Goldstein, an expert at the think tank Defense Priorities, said on X: “The answer to this strategic conundrum is neither sulking, nor multiplying our defense budget by 5X. Rather, what is required is a rational (and long overdue) recalibration of U.S. strategy in the direction of realism and restraint based on the new balance of power in the Western Pacific.”
America’s global distractions suggest arguments in favor of withdrawing from the Pacific’s front lines might become even more appealing.
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