NEWS AND ANALYSIS:

China began sea trials for the third aircraft carrier for its People’s Liberation Army on Wednesday, Chinese state media reported. The official Chinese military website announced the carrier sea trials in a three-paragraph dispatch from Shanghai.

“The ship left Shanghai Jiangnan Shipyard at around 8 a.m. The sea trials will primarily test the reliability and stability of the aircraft carrier’s propulsion and electrical systems,” the notice said.

The new carrier joins what the Pentagon called in its latest annual report the largest military fleet in the world with 370 ships and submarines. That total includes 140 surface warships, highlighted by the carrier development.

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The naval buildup is also significant for three new amphibious assault ships and a fourth under construction, the Pentagon said. The three deployed assault ships were built in the past four years and would play a key role in any Chinese military operations against Taiwan.

The third carrier, known as the Fujian, was launched in 2022 and is the first with a flat deck for landing and recovering aircraft. Two earlier carriers used ski-jump-shaped decks modeled after Soviet aircraft carriers.

The Fujian is named after the province directly across the Taiwan Strait from Taiwan that U.S. military commanders have said is a major target of the Chinese military buildup.

“In the near-term, the [People’s Liberation Army Navy] will have the ability to conduct long-range precision strikes against land targets from its submarine and surface combatants using land-attack cruise missiles, notably enhancing the PRC’s power projection capability,” the Pentagon report said, using the abbreviation for People’s Republic of China.

The Fujian is larger and more technologically advanced than two earlier carriers, the Shandong, commissioned in 2019, and the Liaoning, a rebuilt Ukrainian aircraft carrier acquired in 1998. The Shandong conducted a transit east of Taiwan in April 2023 in a show of force against the island Beijing regards as a breakaway province.

The Fujian is said to employ an advanced catapult-launch system for warplanes. Sea trials are a final step before full commissioning which is expected to take up to a year.

President Xi Jinping has called for the nation to become a “maritime great power” as part of his plan for national rejuvenation — interpreted by most U.S. analysts as China achieving global dominance. Carriers are key elements of that plan, and the strategy calls for the Chinese navy to become a “blue water navy” capable of expanding its military reach and controlling the seas closest to China‘s long coastline.

Retired Navy Capt. Jim Fanell said China’s recent economic problems have not significantly slowed the naval buildup, which includes eight new Type 055 Renhai-class cruisers, eight Type 054 Jiangkai II frigates and a submarine rescue ship over the past several years.

“In addition, the PLAN launched one Type 075 Yushen-class amphibious assault ship, five cruisers and destroyers, two newer Type 054B frigates, and three nuclear-powered submarines,” Mr. Fanell said in a recent article in the U.S. Naval Institute journal Proceedings.

The naval power includes what China has said is a significant increase in the quality of its warships, especially frigates that began sea trials this year.

Mr. Fanell said that China’s two carriers, the Liaoning and Shandong, are not the same caliber as Navy carriers, but that both have engaged in active drills over the past several years in the South China Sea and near Taiwan. “It seems clear that, while much of the world questions the efficacy of aircraft carriers because of the proliferation of anticarrier missile systems, the PLAN is doubling down on them,” he said.

The United States operates 11 aircraft carriers and nine aircraft carrying amphibious assault ships.

Report: U.S. losing information war

The United States is losing the information war with China and needs to unify multiple capabilities in the domain to win in the future, according to a report by a group of experts.

Washington “lacks a coherent doctrine of information warfare, which has put the U.S. at a disadvantage,” five specialists wrote in a recent article in The Cyber Defense Review, a journal.

China is using a comprehensive information warfare doctrine and advanced physical information warfare tools, backed by a totalitarian information control system, the report said. Chinese information warfare techniques employ limited objectives, conducted away from its borders, higher in tempo, shorter in duration, but highly decisive.

Beijing is also combining the thinking of the ancient strategist Sun Tzu with that of Mao Zedong, using an approach focused on psychology and “used as a weapon in and of itself rather than as a support tool.”

Information warfare tools include people and institutions, such as Confucius Institutes and influence agents, as well as social media platforms like TikTok.

“With TikTok, the [Chinese Communist Party] has a platform that both collects data on users and over which it has complete control of what content is delivered to users,” the report said. “The United States is failing to compete with China in the information warfare realm because of divisions and disunified policies.”

“The U.S. is behind its strategic near-peer competitors, specifically China, due to the lack of a clearly implemented and unified approach, definitional chaos within the information environment, and inefficient utilization of evolving data and information into intelligence,” the report said.

Craig Albert, one of the authors, told Inside the Ring the report shows how and why the United States is lagging behind China in ways that constitute a national security threat.

“To alleviate the concerns and protect the U.S. from Chinese and other forms of influence operations, we recommend a unified approach, either through a unified command, or a consistent strategy [inside the] Department of Defense,” said Mr. Albert, a political science professor at August University in Georgia. “Once this occurs, the U.S. can more efficiently go on the offensive, and set the narrative on its own terms, rather than acting reactively.”

To thwart Chinese information operations, he said, the United States needs a “whole-of-society counter-intelligence approach” that identifies the threats and acts in unison to counter them.

“This would allow for active democracy promotion, the promotion and advocacy of human rights against Chinese targets, and would be offensive in nature, rather than constantly reacting and catching up to the propaganda China has widely disseminated to win over American minds on their terms,” he said.

The report, “Weaponizing Words: Using Technology to Proliferate Information Warfare,” was written by five current or former experts with August University, including Army Lt. Col. Joseph Huitt, a cyber warfare operations officer at the Army Cyber Command; and Lydia Snider, an Army civilian specialist on foreign malign influence. Other authors include Lance Y. Hunter, a professor at Augusta University, and Samantha Mullaney, an intelligence specialist.

Poll: 81% of Americans dislike China

A new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center reveals that 81% of Americans dislike China, including 43% who hold very unfavorable views of Beijing.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is also disliked by millions of Americans, with 79% of those surveyed saying they have little or no confidence in Mr. Xi to “do the right thing regarding world affairs,” according to Pew’s findings contained in a report made public Wednesday.

Just 9% told the pollster they had some or a lot of confidence in the Chinese leaders, while 10% reported never having heard of Mr. Xi.

Among Republicans, 68% of conservatives and 43% of liberals and moderates reported holding negative views of China, while there were no differences among Democrats — liberals, moderates or conservatives.

A total of 83% of conservative Republicans said China’s power has grown in recent years, while around 70% of conservative Republicans voiced concerns about China’s territorial disputes with neighbors, including 30% saying they are very worried.

“Americans increasingly see China as an enemy,” Pew stated. “Around four-in-ten (42%) say China is an enemy of the U.S. — the largest share since we began asking this question in 2021.”

Half of all those polled described China as a competitor, with only 6% describing China as a partner.

In the past two years, the survey found a significant increase in those who say China’s influence is growing. Seventy-one percent said in the latest poll that Beijing’s influence increased. By contrast, in 2022, 66% said China’s influence increased.

The poll was conducted April 1 to April 7 among a sample of 3,600 Americans.

China spending over $710 billion on defense

Contrary to official Chinese figures, the People’s Liberation Army is spending more than $700 billion annually on military and defense, according to a report by the American Enterprise Institute.

“Beijing’s publicly released military budget is inaccurate and does not adequately capture the colossal scope and scale of China’s ongoing military buildup and wide-ranging armed forces modernization,” a new analysis released this week by AEI defense analyst Mackenzie Eaglen concludes.

The estimate of $710.6 billion for the 2022 military budget is triple what Beijing has claimed and nearly equal to U.S. defense spending for that year, the report said. The report said U.S. intelligence estimates place China’s defense spending, when factoring in relative purchasing power and state control over spending, is around $700 billion.

The figure published by Beijing for 2022 was $229 billion.

Adjusting that figure for purchasing power parity and cheaper Chinese military wages brings the estimate to around $549 billion.

Adding funding for the People’s Armed Police, an internal security military force nearly as large as the Chinese army, the Chinese coast guard and other undisclosed research and development spending brings the new estimate to $710.6 billion, the report said.

The report said the American spy community estimate on Chinese military spending required more transparency to reveal details of the budget breakdown and better inform policy debates on U.S. defense investments and gaps needed to deal with the threat posed by China.

Last year’s congressional defense authorization bill required the Pentagon to conduct a comprehensive study on Chinese military spending.

“Getting to the bottom of how much China spends on its military should be paramount for the U.S. government if the Pentagon is serious about China being a ‘pacing challenge,’” the report said. “The U.S. military cannot expect to keep up if it does not know how fast China’s military is moving.”

• Contact Bill Gertz on X @BillGertz.