China's aircraft carrier accomplishes its mission - bolster Chinese pride
Trefor Moss says China's first aircraft carrier may not be combat-ready, should regional rivalries escalate, but as a symbol of national pride it has already won the battle on the home front
There's a war on (you must have noticed). It is a war on several fronts: China is fighting Japan to the east, the Philippines and Vietnam to the south, and the United States wherever you choose to look. And it's escalating.
This week, China unveiled the ultimate weapon in this war: the aircraft carrier Liaoning. It is exactly the right weapon for the kind of war that China is fighting - which is a war of words, of feelings, of gestures, and of symbols.
As China and its neighbours squabble over obscure territories such as the Diaoyu and Spratly islands, the Liaoning - which officially entered navy service on Tuesday - fired its opening salvo in this war of sentiment and self-image. Its first mission was not to destroy enemy targets, but to create an impression. It accomplished that mission beautifully, without even raising anchor.
The ship's commissioning was like a graduation ceremony, only it was the Chinese nation as a whole that was graduating, attaining membership of the world's most exclusive military club. There is no symbol of military power more potent than an aircraft carrier, and now China has one, for the first time. Let the trumpets of nationalism sound.
But there's a big drawback. A phoney war is the only sort that the Liaoning is any good for. In a real shooting war, it would be mincemeat.
China's leaders are, of course, well aware of this. When they bought the carrier, a rusty relic of the Soviet war machine, from Ukraine in the 1990s, they initially planned, or so they said, to turn the ship into a floating casino. Instead, they opted for a different sort of gamble, and set about turning the ship once more into a functioning military vessel.
But it was always going to be a ship with severe limitations. The now-renamed Liaoning is like an iPhone without any apps: it's nothing more than a dumb platform. It needs aircraft, and pilots who can fly them (it currently has neither). It needs a dedicated flotilla of support ships that can defend it (same story). It needs crewmen who understand the complexities of carrier operations (not something you can pilfer from the Pentagon mainframe). All these essential working parts will take a long time to develop and integrate into a fully operational machine.