Xi ties China’s commercial maritime reach to military ambitions
China has built the world’s largest navy, with more than 400 ships and submarines that make its fleet about 35% larger than the U.S. Navy by hull count, according to official U.S. figures reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The U.S. Navy remains ahead by gross tonnage, meaning its ships are larger on average. But in recent years, China has kicked off the serial production of ever-larger and more capable vessels, ordering them at scale and building them with speed. Official U.S. data seen by The Wall Street Journal show that since 2020, China has added 71 major warships and submarines, including 19 in 2025.
Fleet scale and U.S. industrial limits
China’s fleet draws on the scale of its maritime economy. China is the world’s largest sea-trading nation, and its shipyards produce more than half of the world’s merchant vessels every year; The Wall Street Journal said that scale allows China to build warships quickly. On any given day, as many as 100 Chinese naval ships operate on some of Asia’s busiest trade and transportation routes, pressuring rivals and training for a potential conflict with the United States. Larger and more sophisticated vessels routinely push farther into waters long dominated by American forces.
The Wall Street Journal wrote, “It is one of the largest peacetime naval buildups in modern history.” It also wrote: “For centuries, China was a continental force. Its sudden, historic emergence as one of the world’s top maritime powers is challenging the U.S. on a scale it hasn’t faced since World War II.”
The accompanying displacement graphic repeated the same three-entry sequence three times:
| Sequence | Graphic entries |
|---|---|
| First | 13,000 metric tons; 7,500 metric tons; 4,000 metric tons |
| Second | 13,000 metric tons; 7,500 metric tons; 4,000 metric tons |
| Third | 13,000 metric tons; 7,500 metric tons; 4,000 metric tons |
The Wall Street Journal described the United States as having “a broken industrial base.” Little cargo moves on U.S.-flagged ships, and the country produces very few oceangoing commercial vessels. The United States has struggled to expand an approximately 290-ship navy; programs to build frigates, extend the lives of aging cruisers and operate a large fleet of littoral combat ships have foundered. A Navy Department report said the shipbuilding budget had doubled over the past two decades, yet the country had no more naval ships than it did in 2003 while adversaries “built fleets at a pace not seen in generations.” Michael Studeman, who spent 35 years in the U.S. Navy and retired in 2023 as head of the Office of Naval Intelligence, described the gap as American “sea-blindness”: the country remained a naval power but was no longer a maritime one.
The Trump administration has said it is restoring U.S. shipbuilding capacity, reforming workforce training and eliminating burdensome regulations. “President Trump has prioritized restoring American maritime dominance unlike any of his predecessors,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said. A State Department spokesman said, “China’s rapid naval expansion raises serious concerns about Beijing’s military ambitions.” The spokesman said Beijing uses its maritime capabilities to project military power, advance expansive territorial claims and intimidate its neighbors, while the United States will uphold freedom of navigation and stand with its allies and partners. China’s Ministry of Defense did not respond to a request for comment.
Fleet reach extends beyond Asia
Beijing has financed the construction of a vast overseas network of ports, from Sri Lanka to Israel and Peru. The Wall Street Journal said the seaports facilitate China’s globe-spanning trade while opening potential access points for the navy. China’s coast guard and fishing fleets are the largest of any nation. The paper said research vessels were mapping the oceans from the Mariana Trench to the Arctic, crisscrossing the world’s waters and studying critical undersea environments to gather data for scientists, companies and naval commanders alike. Sprawling dual-use shipyards fueled by commercial orders from around the world would be ready for wartime operations. An accompanying graphic cited AidData, a research lab at William and Mary, for loans and grants; Global Fishing Watch for vessel tracking; and Vantor for satellite imagery.
Around 2014, China began turning reefs in the South China Sea first into artificial islands and then into military bases, a development The Wall Street Journal said was “shifting the power balance in that waterway.” A few years later, China inaugurated its first overseas base in Djibouti on Africa’s east coast and signed a secret pact for access to a Cambodian naval base. China also began expanding naval bases along its own coast, with new piers, wharfs, drydocks, weapons depots and other facilities.
The Wall Street Journal wrote: “The large Chinese navy is expanding its missions in unprecedented ways and training at a fast tempo.” Early last year, the Chinese warship Zunyi sailed around Australia and staged live-fire drills around 5,000 miles from China’s coast, forcing commercial flights to divert. Months later, the 13,000-ton vessel trained for combat in a carrier strike group. After clocking 200 days and 50,000 nautical miles at sea, it set out in January to practice hunting submarines. The paper described surface combatants like the Zunyi as “some of the most sophisticated in the world,” showcasing Beijing’s ambitions for a “blue water” force capable of projecting power far from China’s shores and protecting its overseas interests. China calls these ships destroyers, but their size and firepower led the United States to classify them as guided-missile cruisers.
Nine more Zunyi-class ships have followed the first, which joined service in 2020. In December, one sailed into the West Pacific in a four-vessel task force that also included a 35,000-ton amphibious assault ship sized to carry 30 helicopters. Concerned Australian officials sent a patrol aircraft to monitor the formation. Thomas Shugart, a former U.S. Navy submariner and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said, “They’re not building a bunch of little corvettes.” He added, “They’re building a world-class navy.”
On Changxing Island across from Shanghai, two neighboring shipyards build commercial ships, from natural-gas carriers to giant containerships, for a global roster of customers, while the same yards can be seen building high-end warships for China’s navy. China has rapidly turned the island into a major shipbuilding center and strategic asset. An analysis of satellite images from Vantor, conducted by Thomas Shugart, showed two amphibious ships, two cruisers, three destroyers, two frigates and other small gray-hulled vessels under construction or maintenance at the same time on May 10, 2026. Five accompanying image captions identify the same location and date. Five years earlier, open fields stood where some of the ships were rising.
Construction on a new yard was barely complete when crews began work in 2023 on the 40,000-ton Sichuan, one of the world’s largest amphibious ships and a so-called “drone carrier.” Its emergence surprised naval analysts because it was bigger and more sophisticated than the amphibious vessels the Chinese navy had begun receiving just two years earlier. In June this year, a new class of submarine, likely nuclear-powered, appeared at one of the two Changxing yards. “We were all kind of gobsmacked,” Shugart said. The Jiangnan shipyard where it emerged had not been known to produce nuclear-powered boats but appears to have been quietly tasked to do so. U.S. Navy leaders said the expansion they had tracked has “dramatically increased” China’s submarine-production capacity as the country shifts from diesel-electric boats to nuclear ones. By 2040, U.S. officials expect Chinese submarines to operate routinely in the Indian Ocean, Arctic approaches and possibly the Atlantic. An accompanying graphic cited the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
The Chinese navy is also building a regular presence beyond the first island chain and training to prevent U.S. forces from coming too close to China’s mainland in a war. Ryan D. Martinson, an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College, called that expansion of China’s “strategic depth.” He said the goal was “conducting high-end naval operations against another great power, the U.S., as far east as possible.”
Carrier operations move into contested waters
China’s development of carrier aviation began with the unfinished Varyag. The Wall Street Journal described the buyer as a “shadowy” entertainment company based in the gambling hub of Macau. In 1998, the company bought the carrier, originally ordered for the Soviet Union, for $20 million after it was left to rust unfinished in a Ukrainian shipyard. Its Chinese buyers said they wanted to turn the stripped-down hulk into a floating casino, but The Wall Street Journal reported that the explanation was a ruse. China’s inexperienced navy had never built or operated a carrier and treated the purchase as an experiment. It took 15 years to transform the deteriorating vessel into a functioning ship and learn how to fly planes from it. Some naval analysts mocked the effort at the time. China now has three aircraft carriers, with a fourth on the way that Western experts believe will be nuclear-powered.
The transformation is driven in part by Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s conviction that the rise and fall of nations is linked inextricably to the oceans. Shortly after he became president, Xi told the Communist Party’s senior leaders in 2013 that it was time to make their country a “maritime great power.” He noted how sea voyages had enabled Western countries to open new routes, expand overseas colonies, control trade and become world powers. From China’s past, Xi cited the 15th-century expeditions of Adm. Zheng He, whose “treasure fleet” delivered ceramics to the Strait of Hormuz and returned with giraffes from the eastern coast of Africa before China turned away from the oceans and entered a period of isolationism. During the 19th-century Opium Wars, Western attackers came from the sea and sped the collapse of China’s last imperial dynasty.
Current and former U.S. officials said China was amassing the kind of all-round sea power that Alfred Thayer Mahan, one of America’s most influential maritime strategists, prescribed for his country more than a century ago. Studeman said: “Xi Jinping himself is more Mahanian than any American leader has been probably since Teddy Roosevelt.” He added: “He fully believes, as someone who has studied history, that any great power ultimately is a global maritime power.” Martinson said Chinese military writings before Xi often focused on the navy’s flaws, “looking at the U.S. Navy as if it’s 10-feet tall.” Xi pushed the navy to have great ambitions of becoming a highly capable force. In a paper titled “Chairman Xi’s Navy” earlier this year, Martinson wrote that Xi may rank among the greatest navalist statesmen in modern history. “And that is what it has become in a remarkably short period of time,” Martinson said.
The Wall Street Journal said Washington believed China was “on the cusp of a carrier spree.” A Pentagon report from last year, based on classified intelligence, estimated that China would have nine aircraft carriers by 2035, bringing it close to parity with the U.S. carrier fleet of 11, whose total count was not expected to change during that period. The paper wrote, “That would be a stunning buildup for a country that didn’t operate any carriers less than two decades ago.”
In the 2000s, the United States hosted Chinese delegations on tours of American carriers. Groups of six to 10 Chinese military officers would fan out and ask how everything worked, Studeman recalled. “The approach at the time was, if we show them how capable we are, they’ll be intimidated and they won’t ever think that they could challenge us,” Studeman said. He opposed the exchanges, he said, because “all they were doing was learning how we operated carriers so they could operate their own.”
The Wall Street Journal called the United States the “gold standard” for carrier operations but said China’s deployments had extended steadily outward, with ship movements tracked by Japan and shared with the newspaper. A graphic titled “Approximate areas of operations, by year” appeared six times and cited the Japan Ministry of Defense.
In June 2025, a Chinese carrier accompanied by other navy ships sailed into the ocean beyond Japan and squared off against a second Chinese carrier strike group in adversarial drills. It was the first time China had sent two carriers into the broader West Pacific at the same time. A J-15 jet fighter launched from one of them tailed a Japanese patrol craft for 40 minutes, at one point coming within a horizontal distance of 150 feet.
For the first time last year, a Chinese carrier sailed beyond a Pacific chain of islands that includes Guam, a U.S. military hub, while fighter jets practiced hundreds of takeoffs and landings from their flight decks. Images showed crews in bright vests giving hand signals before launch. In November, after the Fujian entered service, Chinese state media celebrated the “three-carrier era” as a symbol of global prestige. The Fujian uses electromagnetic catapults, a system used in carriers only by the United States before then. President Trump directed the U.S. Navy to build future carriers without that system and return to steam catapults, a change American Navy officials had long opposed.
The first island chain anchors the contest
The Wall Street Journal reported that China’s core military priority is the maritime arc off its coastline, from the Yellow Sea to the East and South China Seas. China is working to dominate those waters, absorb Taiwan, which the paper described as an island democracy, and block U.S. forces from becoming involved in a conflict. The paper wrote: “This is potentially the world’s most dangerous maritime theater.” The report also said the United States wants to prevent Chinese hegemony in the maritime arena. Vital trade arteries run through the region, linking East Asia’s industrial powerhouses with the rest of the world. Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines, U.S. allies and partners that form part of what strategists call the first island chain, bound these waters. Defending that line constitutes the Pentagon’s top China strategy.
The Wall Street Journal assessed that if China and the United States ended up in a head-to-head battle, it would likely occur in that region — a scenario that has shaped a peacetime military buildup by Beijing “with few parallels in modern history, including a formidable Rocket Force.” Studeman said: “The Chinese have the ability to not just challenge but potentially defeat big portions of America’s traditional naval force, especially inside the first island chain and even outside the first island chain.”
The Wall Street Journal wrote: “China has worked methodically to tighten its grip in the strategic seas around the first island chain. Its forces maintain a dense, layered and daily presence unmatched by any other nation.” Security officials who track Chinese movements said about six navy ships operate continuously around Taiwan, surging rapidly for periodic exercises. Three times as many appear in the South China Sea to demonstrate force against the Philippines and Vietnam, with whom Beijing is embroiled in territorial disputes. The broader Chinese fleet trains in ever-larger numbers across this swath, where it might one day be ordered to enforce a blockade or fight a war.
The navy is part of a sprawling network of maritime forces. The Wall Street Journal said the network’s “unpredictable operations have flummoxed Beijing’s opponents.” The coast guard has used water cannons and rammed rival vessels while enforcing Beijing’s claims. The paper reported: “Thousands of fishing boats, trained to work as a shadowy militia when needed, swarm contested areas without warning.” Official survey vessels criss-cross disputed waters to test rival governments. An accompanying graphic cited the Taiwan National Security Council. The Wall Street Journal said these movements have fundamentally altered the region’s security dynamics, sharply increasing demands on the United States and its allies to track Chinese ships and be ready to respond.
China’s lead by hull count is coupled with commercial shipyards, overseas ports, coast guard and fishing forces, research ships and military bases that extend its reach. The United States remains ahead by gross tonnage but has struggled to expand an approximately 290-ship fleet as its industrial base weakened. The competition now spans carrier operations beyond the first island chain and daily deployments around Taiwan and the South China Sea.