China’s Third Aircraft Carrier, the Fujian, Enters Service

BEIJING, Nov 7 (Reuters) – China has commissioned its first indigenously designed aircraft carrier after months of sea trials, and named it the Fujian, after the province facing Taiwan across a narrow strait, according to state media reports on Friday.

President Xi Jinping attended the commissioning and flag-presenting ceremony of the Fujian in Hainan province on Wednesday, and boarded the vessel for an inspection tour, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

The Fujian is China’s third aircraft carrier, with a flat flight deck and electromagnetic catapults for take-offs that make it a potentially far more powerful naval weapon than China’s first two Russian-designed carriers.

The Fujian will be able to carry significantly more and heavier-armed jet fighters than the Liaoning and Shandong carriers, which are smaller and rely on ramps to launch aircraft.

In sea trials ahead of the commissioning, the Chinese navy launched its new carrier version of the J-35 stealth fighter and an early-warning aircraft, the KJ-600, as well as a variant of its established J-15 fighter.

Regional military attaches and analysts say they will be watching upcoming deployments, trying to gauge how quickly the Fujian is able to become combat ready by monitoring flight operations and efforts to combine its operations with support ships and submarines.

(Reporting by Beijing Newsroom and Greg Torode in Hong Kong; Editing by Jacqueline Wong and Raju Gopalakrishnan)

(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2025.

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