People's Liberation Army Navy

The People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is the largest navy in the world by hull count and the centrepiece of China's bid for maritime power. Its strategy, formalised as "near seas defence and far seas protection," pairs the denial of the Yellow, East China and South China Seas to a rival power with a growing capacity to protect sea lanes, overseas investments and citizens far from home. Western assessments put the battle force at more than 370 hulls, with projections approaching 435 by 2030, and the PLAN launched or commissioned more than twenty major combatants in 2025 alone.

The fleet is built around three aircraft carriers. Liaoning and Shandong operate ski-jump air wings, while Fujian, commissioned in November 2025 at Sanya, is China's first carrier with electromagnetic catapults and the first outside the United States Navy to field them. The surface escort force is dominated by the Renhai (Type 055) cruiser-sized destroyers and a large series of Luyang III (Type 052D) destroyers, backed by Jiangkai II frigates and Jiangdao corvettes built at a pace no other yard system matches. Amphibious capability rests on Yuzhao landing platform docks and Yushen assault ships, with the Type 076 Sichuan, a 40,000-tonne assault ship fitted with an electromagnetic catapult for combat drones, running sea trials ahead of commissioning.

The submarine force combines Jin-class ballistic missile submarines carrying the JL-3 for continuous sea-based deterrence, Shang-class nuclear attack boats in successive improved batches, and a large conventional flotilla of Yuan, Song and Kilo submarines. A next-generation Type 096 ballistic missile submarine and a nuclear-powered carrier, provisionally designated Type 004 and under construction at Dalian, mark the next steps in a programme that has moved from coastal defence to nuclear-powered blue-water forces in a single generation.

Alongside the battle fleet, the PLAN relies on mass in the littorals: Houbei missile catamarans, a large mine warfare flotilla, and one of the world's biggest auxiliary and survey fleets, which sustains distant deployments and maps the operating environment. The China Coast Guard and the maritime militia extend this reach in grey-zone operations around Taiwan, the Senkaku Islands, Second Thomas Shoal and Scarborough Shoal, where pressure is applied below the threshold of armed conflict.

Operationally, the PLAN maintains a continuous escort task force in the Gulf of Aden that has run without interruption since 2008, sustains its overseas base at Djibouti, and conducts regular carrier deployments beyond the First Island Chain into the Philippine Sea and the Western Pacific. Joint exercises with Russia in the Sea of Japan, the Baltic and the Gulf of Oman, along with port calls across the Indian Ocean and Africa, illustrate a navy that now plans for sustained operations far from Chinese shores while its primary war-fighting focus remains a Taiwan contingency.