China defence ministry says building second aircraft carrier

China on Thursday confirmed it is building a second aircraft carrier, as neighbours worry about Beijing’s new assertiveness to claims in the South China Sea.

The carrier will be designed in China and built in the port of Dalian, said Yang Yujun a spokesman for the Defense Ministry. That carrier has yet to take on its full aviation complement.

This photo taken on August 4, 2011 shows China’s first aircraft carrier, the former Soviet carrier Varyag which China bought from Ukraine in 1998, at the port of Dalian, in northeast China’s Liaoning province.

The new carrier’s design and construction is “based on research and experimentation” on the Liaoning and will bring “improvements in many aspects”, Yang said in a statement. It will have a displacement of 50,000 tons – signifcantly less than the largest US carriers – and will carry China’s J-15 fighters.

China claims nearly all the South China Sea, believed to have huge deposits of oil and gas, through which about $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes every year, and has been building up military facilities like runways on the islands it controls.

“The U.S. has many aircraft carriers that are traveling all over the place in the South China Sea, which has caused problems for us”, he said. “It is a sacred duty of the Chinese armed forces to safeguard maritime security, sovereignty over territorial seas and the maritime rights of the country”.

China claims sovereignty over nearly all of the South China Sea, which is home to key shipping lanes, rich fishing grounds and a potential wealth of mineral resources.

Yang said the date of the second carrier’s launching would “depend on progress made at the current stage”.

China says it faces a threat not only from home-grown Islamists in its far western region of Xinjiang, but also from militants in the Middle East, some of whom it says are from Xinjiang. “In the near future, we will focus on training, aiming to make the ship become fully operational within a short period”, Hefei’s captain, Commander Zhao Yanquan, told China Daily on December 14.

The Pentagon, in a report earlier this year, said Beijing could build multiple aircraft carriers over the next 15 years.