FEATURE: The myth of the Chinese aircraft carrier

BEIJING, May 9 Kyodo

The pride of China's naval fleet, wags say, incorporates the very latest in radar-evading stealth technology, so powerful it is as if it didn't even exist.

And of course, it doesn't.

The Thais have one, the Indians have one and recently retired a second and the United States has 13, but China has yet to acquire that most potent symbol of national power, an aircraft carrier.

February's visit of the U.S. supercarrier John C. Stennis to Hong Kong must have caused many a patriotic Chinese to wonder, "Why don't we have one of those?"

The answer is simple -- aircraft carriers cost too much, require skills and technologies China cannot easily obtain, and, according to a former Beijing-based U.S. military official, would have little use where it most mattered, in a conflict with Taiwan.

But that hasn't stopped journalists and China-hawks from creating phantom Chinese flattops. Rumors intimating China was about to acquire an aircraft carrier have been cropping up regularly in the Chinese and international press for nearly a decade.

The latest sensation emerged early this year when Hong Kong's Mingpao News reported China's first aircraft carrier would be in service by 2005. The article, quoting unidentified sources, went into great detail, describing the planned vessel as a 48,000-ton light carrier able to carry 24 Russian-built fighters.

But the story was never confirmed, and another Hong Kong daily was quick to find unnamed Chinese officials to deny the rumor.

According to a former U.S. naval attache in Beijing, the navy's ambitions are being quashed by high-ranking officials in the capital.

"I was told very directly, then and more recently, that the (military) still wants one or more carriers, but that Beijing said no -- too costly to acquire and operate, too complex to build and then integrate, not useful for today's real priority -- Taiwan," retired Adm. Eric McVadon told Kyodo News.

One story that refuses to die, however, centers around purchase of the unfinished Ukrainian aircraft carrier Varyag by a Macao company, Chinluck Holdings. The company, which allegedly wants to convert the 67,000-ton ship into a casino, is widely suspected of being a front company for the People's Liberation Army (PLA).

Even in 1992, U.S. China-hawk Sen. Jesse Helms was warning legislators of the danger posed by Chinese possession of the Varyag.

And early last year, a respected Hong Kong periodical said British and French companies had made Beijing an offer to equip the Varyag, which was "somewhere between the Black Sea and the South China Sea," with many of the systems needed to make it operational.

But as of early May, the Varyag's rusting hulk still rested at its berth at the Nikolayev shipyard on the Black Sea, according to Valeriy Khabarov, managing director of the nearby commercial port.

With an economy set to surpass $1 trillion in annual output within the next several years, China has, given the motivation, the financial clout to develop or purchase an aircraft carrier.

But the motivation is missing.

Chinese and foreign analysts have pointed to two theaters -- Taiwan and the South China Sea's Spratly Islands -- where a Chinese aircraft carrier could possibly alter the strategic picture. But because Taiwan lies so close to China, an aircraft carrier would have little value in a cross-straits conflict.

"A carrier would be a target and not an asset in the Taiwan scenarios I envision," McVadon said.

Carriers could be used to assert Chinese sovereignty in the huge swath of the South China Sea that Beijing claims as its own.

"A carrier could matter in the South China Sea for all sorts of scenarios like supporting island grabs, protecting oil flow, and simply intimidating navies like those of Vietnam and the Philippines -- but it would still be a tempting target for land-based air(craft) from those places," McVadon said.

But maintaining even one carrier on-station in the area at all times would require a fleet of flattops.

"Given China's less efficient logistics and maintenance operations, its navy might need four or five carriers to keep one on location," Robert Ross, a Boston College professor of Chinese politics, noted in a recent book.

And that prohibitive cost is the main factor keeping the myth of the Chinese aircraft carrier from becoming reality.

Prof. Zhang Zhaozhong, a military affairs commentator at the PLA National Defense University, balks at the $33 billion the U.S. Navy spends to build, operate, and maintain just one Nimitz-class carrier.

"It is the equivalent of six to seven years of PLA military expenditures. That is to say, our whole military would have to go six to seven years without food, without clothing, without buying any equipment and still wouldn't be able to service one Nimitz-class (aircraft carrier)," Zhang recently told the China News Agency.