From the series Asian giants
With the commissioning of the Fujian, China inaugurates the three-aircraft-carrier era
. The building of the fourth, fifth, and sixth aircraft carriers is widely seen as just a matter of time. However, since the previous Liaoning and Shandong carriers are less advanced, the prospect of always having an advanced aircraft carrier deployed will only become possible with the launching of the fifth: three are needed to maintain a steady rotation with one in use, one in maintenance, and one in training. The real novelty is the capacity to launch the AEW&C Xi'an KJ-600 — Airborne Early Warning and Control aircraft, i.e., planes equipped with radars — from the ship's deck thanks to an electromagnetic catapult: this allows the carrier to operate beyond the range of AEW&C aircraft taking off from land bases. The Sichuan, a helicopter carrier amphibious assault ship and de facto light aircraft carrier, is also equipped with one.
Jin Canrong, professor and vice dean of the School of International Relations of the Renmin University of China, reflects on the unprecedented challenges of the aircraft-carrier era. For a long time, the Middle Kingdom has had a simultaneously strong land and sea presence. However, we must also face historic problems with realism: in the past, our determination in the use of sea power has been insufficient. When Zheng He [1371-1433] undertook ocean voyages, Chinese society did not back them
.
Land and sea in the aircraft-carrier era
The author recalls China's historical dialectic, a hybrid land-sea
country, which has often oscillated between the Grand Canal and the Yellow China
of the interior, and the Blue China
of maritime and global traffic. In 1978, the victory of Deng's line reflected the affirmation of the coastal provinces, drawn into the liberist Pacific Basin. The naval aircraft-carrier programme was born at that time. Today
— writes Jin — we find ourselves facing a similar challenge yet again: how to use maritime force in a scientific way? [...] History has demonstrated that, if there is only hard power while corresponding soft power is lacking — strategic will and the capacity to use it — in the end, all that one does is lose sight of the great opportunities of the time. [...] China's strategists find themselves again facing this crucial challenge
.
The aircraft-carrier era poses the strategic questions of imperialist projection, consisting of capital, arms, and political choices within the system of States. The Dragon will find it hard to entrench itself in its own domestic market, as it did in the 15th century, without unleashing a global crisis. At the core remains the dialectic between China's explosive drives to strengthen its projection abroad and the need to manage the vast metabolism of its domestic market, a dialectic which is intertwined with the ebb and flow of the global market. This is the investigation we will need to carry out in the next few years, starting with the pronouncements of the key provinces in the pluralist centralisation of China's brand of imperialist democracy. The draft of the 15th Five-Year Plan [2026-30], discussed at the CPC's IV Plenum, is a good observatory of this political dynamic, summed up by the Global Times in four axes: high-quality development
, scientific and technological self-reliance
, national security
, and opening up
[Global Times, October 23rd, 2025].
Involution and hunger for conquest
A number of authoritative comments concentrate on the guarantee which China's domestic cycle represents. Justin Yifu Lin, the co-founder of the National School of Development, Peking University, writes that China is a great economy drawn mainly by domestic circulation: more than 85% of its production takes place within the domestic market
. Zheng Yongnian, of Shenzhen-Hong Kong University, specifies that fierce competition between the provinces has fuelled local debt and broken up the unified market, necessary to internal circulation. The provinces have thrown themselves into new sectors, taking on debt; overcapacity has fuelled the deflation of industrial prices, which has dogged China since the summer of 2023. The so-called phenomenon of involution
has occurred, an unintended, runaway consequence of restructuring.
A critical voice, Xie Yanmei, of Berlin's Mercator Institute, grasps its international aspect. The government's policy can temporarily suppress overcapacity, or push it towards new industries, but it cannot eliminate it. On the other hand, the same mechanism that generates involution in the race between the provinces also forges those national Chinese champions which, having survived it, will present themselves in foreign markets with a thirst for conquest heightened by the price wars at home.
A different interpretation of the Plenum instead stresses China's open door
policy. Beijing is offering unprecedented opportunities for Asia, a strong market demand, and an equally strong technological boost to industrial modernisation
. Notwithstanding all the limits of its domestic market, a third of the world's cars are registered in China. Half of them are electric, and China has already installed eighteen million electric recharging stations, twice as many as two years ago. At the Busan APEC summit, Xi Jinping asked Asia to consider partnering with China
: Facts have proved that whoever establishes a solid presence in the Chinese market will stay ahead of the curve in the increasingly fierce international competition
. According to Ding Gang, senior editor at People's Daily, this opening-up line is not rhetorical, but has real roots in Asian development.
A self-confident China in Asia
According to a study by the Washington-based CSIS, APEC economies face growing strategic vulnerabilities due to their dependence on both the US and Chinese markets
. Donald Trump's first trade war had benefitted Asian countries, causing big Western and Chinese groups to diversify away from China and trade to be triangulated towards the US. Vietnam's trade surplus with the United States tripled, while Thailand's doubled.
With the second Trump presidency, the incentives have reversed, effectively punishing the diversification Washington demanded and treating all supply chain relocation as transshipment rather than legitimate commercial policy. The new tariffs hit the countries that had aligned themselves with the United States in the first trade war: the American objective was not to encourage investment in Asia, but in the United States. The result is that for countries in the region, the Chinese market has become more accessible than the American one
.
From the launch of the trade agreement in 2002, Chinese exports towards ASEAN countries have increased twelvefold and imports from ASEAN ninefold. What was in some respects an objective process of regional trade has been accelerated by Chinese restructuring, and subsequently by the American trade war. Ding Gang sees in this the crumbling
of ties to the United States, while Beijing is constantly expanding its own influence
. At the same time, China's domestic market is protecting the Dragon and its Asian partners from American oscillations.
The metals of the rearmament cycle
China presents itself in Asia as a benevolent power, armed with aircraft carriers and instruments which can bend the will of the unstable declining American hegemon. The Busan truce between Trump and Xi saw the use of export controls of rare earths as a Chinese bargaining tool. These metals, monopolised by China and essential to new civil and military technologies, embody a feature of the contention.
The struggle for the control of raw materials has long been a hallmark of the clash between the powers. Lenin devoted parts of the first chapter of Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism to the German economist Fritz Kestner who, in a 1912 study, included stopping supplies of raw materials
among the cartels' coercive methods, and investigated the relationship of dominance
of the raw materials processing industry over the semi-finished products processing industry. Lenin adds: Finance capital is interested not only in the already discovered sources of raw materials but also in potential sources, because present-day technical development is extremely rapid [...] This also applies [...] to new methods of processing and utilising raw materials
.
On the other hand, the hoarding of strategic supplies is also a typical characteristic of rearmament. The possibility of interrupting enemy supply chains needs to be planned in the peaceful phase and is the logical consequence of a cycle of war preparation. Consider — as Yao Yang, dean of the National School of Development, argues — the complete industrial system
set out in China's Five-Year Plan, clearly designed to confront the risk of supply-chain disruptions
. If all the major powers launch a rearmament race, their State, military, and financial apparatuses will inevitably reopen the supply chain file.
Economy and rearmament
Edward Fishman, a high-ranking State Department, Defence, and Treasury official under Barack Obama, describes in Chokepoints [2025] the American use of sanctions, presenting it as an extension, linked to international finance, of the strategic control traditionally implemented by the great powers over geographic straits: the British Empire controlled the Bosporus, while the United States controls the dollar. This idea can be further developed to frame the battle over rare earths, via the chokepoints the global reproduction of capital has scattered across trade between different companies, sectors, and countries. Beijing found itself having an advantageous position in the crossroads between the intersectoral links of the world market and control over a handful of chemical elements that are decisive for certain American, European, and Japanese industries, from the car industry to aerospace, electronics, and healthcare.
In 1869, the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev presented his periodic table of elements, leaving gaps for undiscovered elements, but predicting many of their physical and chemical characteristics with surprising exactness. Among these were scandium, gallium, and germanium. His rare earths also included the lanthanide series, between atomic numbers 57 and 71 of the table. Less well known are the matrices of sectoral interdependencies in the economy, the input-output
tables brought to America by Wassily Leontief in the 1930s, based on the first statistical studies of Soviet economists, liquidated by Stalinism. Leontief would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1973. His tables indicate the relations between the various economic sectors — between the mining and the industrial sectors, for example — and between these and the rest of the world.
Without delving into the details of the tables, it is fair to say that Beijing has linked Mendeleev and Leontief, methodically identifying a series of vulnerable points in global supply chains. This interweaving is forging another weapon for the crisis in the world order.