The aircraft carriers of China are starting to appear less of an experiment and more of an industrial beat, however, the actual test of the transition is not in the number of hulls it has but in the ability to produce sustained and modern airpower at sea.
The third carrier of the People’s Liberation Army Navy is Fujian, which marks the point of discontinuity. It is the first catapult carrier in China that has left behind ski-jump and is heading toward the type of tempo that constitutes blue-water aviation. The significance of that design choice is that catapults increase the range of aircraft which a carrier can fly and in principle increase sortie generation by flying heavier jets with more fuel, weapons and sensors.
The argument has been taken out of Fujian as well through commercial imagery and open reporting. However, the next one is much debated as the Type 004, which is an even bigger category and which the open sources explain as reaching up to 120,000 tons and 90-100 aircrafts, 4-5 electromagnetic catapults, and probably nuclear propulsion. Practically, the transition between conventional and nuclear power is not a vanity upgrade; it alters endurance, the logistics load, and the capability to maintain high electrical loads to sensors and launch systems. A carrier supposed to carry 100 planes must not merely stuff them in there it must get them circulating over and over through maintenance and fueling and arming and spotting and launching without turning the deck into a parking lot.
It is there the friction comes in. The Fujian has been loosely criticized as having deck-flow bottlenecks: even the positions of catapults, elevators, and islands may narrow the movement of aircraft between hangar and launch position and back. Even a strong launch system will not necessarily result in high sortie rates when deck choreography is limited. The operations of the Western carriers take decades to polish all these details as the “pinch point” of the most minimal size can limit all the daily results of the ship.
The focal point is electromagnetic launch. The system of Fujian has often been compared to the U.S. Navy system of EMALS and it has been reported that this system has been tested with a variety of aircrafts, such as stealth fighters and an aerial early warning system. A more recent viral assertion of an arrest of performance-30 ton aircraft 0.2 seconds-shared as a demonstration of its ability to operate by a carrier-independent aviation infrastructure-is out of the scope of honest, official record, but it drives the larger scale: China is attempting to demonstrate it can transport heavy, complicated aircraft at the speed and quantity.
The air wing is still the determining factor. It is only when the fighters embarked on a carrier can survive, locate the target, exchange data, and strike, again and again, that such a carrier becomes strategically persuasive. In the case of China, that would entail having credible fifth-generation carrier fighters in quantity. The Shenyang J-35 is set to serve that purpose as a twin-engine stealth multi-role aircraft with a carrier-optimized form which can be operated on the launch bar and has folding wings to provide deck handling.
In that regard, the “J-35 problem” is not so much whether the jet exists or not but whether it scales. The concept Type 004 presupposes a tremendous air wing, which is diversified and includes fighters, early warning, helicopters, and possibly drones, functioning in a high-tempo cycle. The 100-aircraft carrier without a deep stock of carrier-qualified stealth fighters becomes, indeed, a very large platform with the assumptions of the fourth generation in mind. On the other hand, a full-grown pipeline of J-35s, coupled with dependable catapults and an effective deck plan, is the package that transforms the shipbuilding momentum into working plausibility.
