Chinese aircraft carrier programme

As of 2026, the People's Republic of China has three active aircraft carriers in the Surface Force of the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), namely the Liaoning, Shandong and Fujian. A fourth carrier, currently called "Type 004" and thought to feature nuclear propulsion, has been under construction since 2024. Wang Yunfei, a retired PLA Navy officer, and other naval experts projected in 2018–2019 that China might possess five or six aircraft carriers by the 2030s. In December 2025, the US Defense Department reported that China was planning on acquiring 9 aircraft carriers by 2035. Aircraft carriers had long been an essential component of PLAN's ambition of becoming a blue-water navy, and China had attempted to acquire and study aircraft carriers since the 1970s. In the years after 1985, China acquired four retired aircraft carriers for research and reverse-engineering, namely the British-built Australian light carrier HMAS Melbourne and the ex-Soviet "aircraft-carrying cruisers" Minsk, Kiev and Varyag. The Varyag, which use a ski-jump flight deck for STOBAR operations, later underwent an extensive refit to be converted into the Liaoning, China's first operational aircraft carrier, which also served as a basis for China's subsequent design iterations in her indigenously built sister ship Shandong. The third carrier Fujian, launched in 2022, uses an indigenously developed electromagnetic catapult system for CATOBAR operations.