China’s third aircraft carrier, the Fujian, underwent sea trials beginning in 2023 and has been advancing toward operational status. It is the first Chinese carrier equipped with electromagnetic aircraft launch system catapults — the same technology used on the American Gerald R. Ford class — which allows it to launch heavier aircraft with greater frequency than the ski-jump launch systems on China’s first two carriers, the Liaoning and the Shandong. The Fujian represents a genuine capability advance that brings Chinese carrier aviation meaningfully closer to the operational model that American carriers have perfected over decades. It does not bring the PLAN to American carrier aviation parity, and its operational utility in a Taiwan contingency is less straightforward than its physical characteristics suggest.

The scenario that receives the least public attention in Taiwan Strait analysis is probably the most likely path by which Beijing would attempt to compel Taiwanese political capitulation: a maritime blockade that cuts off Taiwan’s trade without the military and political costs of a full amphibious invasion. Taiwan is an island. It imports approximately 98 percent of its energy and a significant portion of its food. Its export-oriented economy depends entirely on maritime access. A blockade that prevented ships from reaching Taiwanese ports would, within weeks, begin to produce economic and social conditions that make governance difficult and, within months, conditions that make it impossible. The strategic logic is coherent, the military execution is feasible, and the allied response problem is severe.

The People’s Liberation Army Navy has added more ships to its fleet in the past twenty years than most countries have in their entire navies. By hull count, the PLAN is now the largest navy in the world, surpassing the United States Navy in number of surface combatants and submarines. The comparison requires qualification — American vessels are generally larger, more capable on a per-unit basis, and operated by more experienced crews in a navy with a longer tradition of sustained blue-water operations. But the qualification should not obscure the fundamental shift: China has built a navy capable of contesting American naval supremacy in the western Pacific, and it has done so on a timeline that surprised most Western defense analysts.

The Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning sailed through the Taiwan Strait on Monday, April 20, according to Taiwan’s defence ministry — marking the first passage of a carrier through the waterway since late last year.

The transit is a deliberate signal. The strait, roughly 180 kilometers wide at its narrowest, is one of the most politically loaded stretches of water in the world. Beijing claims it as internal waters; Washington and Taipei reject that framing and maintain freedom-of-navigation as a standing principle. Sending a carrier through it is not a routine patrol — it is a message, timed and calculated.