NYT Ought To Dig Deeper on Chinese Aircraft Carrier Report

At first blush, the New York Times reports that the Chinese government is serious about building an aircraft carrier to expand its capabilities.

In an interview published in The Financial Times of London on Monday, the official, Maj. Gen. Quan Lihua, did not say whether China was in fact building a carrier. But the general, a senior official of the Chinese Ministry of National Defense, said having one was the dream of any great military power. He suggested that the United States had nothing to fear should China acquire one for strictly defensive purposes.

“The question is not whether you have an aircraft carrier, but what you do with your aircraft carrier,” he said in the interview. “Even if one day we have an aircraft carrier, unlike another country we will not use it to pursue global deployment or global reach.”

In recent years, Pentagon officials have been warily following Beijing’s ambitious naval buildup. Since 2000, China has constructed at least 60 warships, and its fleet of 860 vessels includes about 60 submarines.

However, digging a little deeper would find that the Chinese have been making blustery statements along these lines for years without any tangible results. They've bought carriers from other countries, including Russia and India, in an attempt to either reverse engineer concepts as a precursor to building a native-made carrier or to retrofit an older one.

There are no ships currently planned or under construction that would fit the description of being an aircraft carrier.

Of course, the real purpose of the story is to claim that the Chinese are looking to develop a carrier as a strictly defensive measure, while the US has repeatedly used them as an offensive weapon.

Let's just ignore that the carriers played a vital role in bringing relief to those hit by the South East Asian earthquake/tsunami not to mention that they helped liberate Iraq from the yoke of tyranny of Saddam Hussein.