Ask which country has the world’s largest navy and the answer depends on what you count. Count warships by hull, and the answer since roughly the late 2010s has been China. The US Department of Defense (DoD) now states it plainly: “numerically, the PRC has the largest navy in the world.” It expects further growth to 2030. Count tonnage, aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines or decades of blue-water experience, and the United States is still comfortably ahead. Both statements are true, and the story sits in the gap between them.
This post looks at how the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) got here, from Liu Huaqing’s near-seas strategy to the Fujian carrier and the shipyards behind it. It covers the figures, the strategy, the ships, the bases and grey-zone fleets, and what it means. The wider People’s Liberation Army is a story of its own and gets only brief mention.
How the numbers add up
The most widely quoted figure comes from the Pentagon’s annual China report. The December 2024 edition credited the PLAN with “a battle force of over 370 ships and submarines, including more than 140 major surface combatants.” As quoted by the US Congressional Research Service (CRS), the same report expected the fleet to reach 395 ships by 2025 and 435 by 2030, with much of the growth in major surface combatants. That count excludes around 60 small Houbei-class missile boats.
The US Navy’s own intelligence arm has produced slightly different numbers. An unclassified Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) paper from February 2020, reproduced by CRS, applied the US Navy’s counting rules to China. It put the PLAN at 360 battle force ships in 2020, projected 400 for 2025 and 425 for 2030. The sources thus disagree at the margins (five ships lower for 2025 in the DoD projection, ten higher for 2030), but both describe a fleet growing by roughly ten ships a year. On the ONI figures, China overtook the US Navy some time between 2015 and 2020.
The latest Pentagon report, released in December 2025, is notable for what it leaves out: it covers Fujian‘s sea trials and the aim of nine carriers by 2035 but gives no headline fleet total. The most recent official US figure is therefore still “over 370”, with projections layered on top.
For comparison, the US Navy had 296 battle force ships at the end of September 2024, according to CRS. Its shipbuilding plan published in May 2026 says the Department of the Navy “currently operates 291 battle force ships”, against a legal requirement of 355, and admits that the fleet is no larger than it was in 2003.
Independent analysts slice the data differently again. A 2024 study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) counted only active, crewed, missile- or torpedo-armed ships over 1,000 tonnes and found 234 Chinese warships to 219 American ones. Battle force totals, it noted, include support ships: 126 for the US and 167 for China, on International Institute for Strategic Studies data. CSIS also counted about 80 Chinese missile patrol craft, against the Pentagon’s 60 or so. Whatever the method, China leads on hulls; only the margin changes.
What a ship count does not tell you
Hull counts treat a 1,500-tonne corvette and a 100,000-tonne supercarrier as one ship each, which is why CRS calls simple comparisons “highly problematic”, while accepting that trends still say something.
On most measures of heavy combat power, the US lead is still large. The US Navy operates 11 aircraft carriers, all nuclear-powered, against China’s three conventionally powered ones. CSIS found that American carriers and amphibious assault ships account for about 90 per cent of the gap in aggregate displacement. Under the sea the gap is wider still: in 2024 CSIS counted 66 US nuclear submarines against China’s 12, and called submarines “an area of unquestioned U.S. dominance.” In vertical launch system (VLS) missile cells, the US had about 9,900 to China’s roughly 4,200. On current trends, though, CSIS expected China to catch up on that measure around 2027.
Then there is experience. The US Navy has sustained global operations for generations; the PLAN has never fought a major fleet action, and its long-range operations date from the last two decades. Geography cuts the other way. The US spreads its fleet across the world, while China concentrates on its own region, where land-based aircraft and anti-ship missiles that no navy tally includes can support it.
From Baimamiao to the near seas
The PLAN traces its birth to 23 April 1949, when the East China Military Region Navy was set up at Baimamiao in Taizhou, Jiangsu province, under Zhang Aiping, as Communist forces pushed towards the Yangtze. The date was formally confirmed as the navy’s founding day in 1989. The early force relied on defected or captured Nationalist vessels, converted merchant ships and, in the 1950s, Soviet ships and training.
For three decades it was essentially a coastal defence force, guarding against Nationalist raids from Taiwan and a possible American landing with torpedo boats, patrol craft and submarines. The Cultural Revolution set technical progress back further. There were moments of action, notably the January 1974 clash that took the Paracel Islands from South Vietnam, but little capacity to operate far from home.
The turning point came under Admiral Liu Huaqing, who commanded the PLAN from 1982 to 1988 and is often called the father of the modern Chinese navy. With Deng Xiaoping’s backing he replaced pure coastal defence with “active defence, near seas operations”. The “near seas” meant the Yellow Sea, East China Sea and South China Sea, the waters enclosed by the so-called first island chain running from Japan through Taiwan and the Philippines to Borneo. The Central Military Commission adopted the concept as national maritime strategy in 1987. In March 1988 the PLAN fought Vietnamese forces at Johnson South Reef in the Spratlys, its first sea battle under the new approach.
Liu’s name is also attached to a three-stage timetable from around 1988, described by the historian C. J. Jenner for CSIS’s Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative. The navy would be able to defend China’s interests out to the first island chain by 2000. By 2020 it would command the seas out to a second chain running through the Bonin and Mariana Islands. By 2049, the centenary of the People’s Republic, it would deploy carrier battle groups worldwide. How formal this timetable ever was is debated, and the early milestones slipped, but it captures the direction of travel. Liu also lobbied for aircraft carriers long before China had one.
The modernisation sprint
In the 1990s the PLAN still relied largely on 1950s Soviet designs, so it first bought its way forward. Between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s it acquired 12 Kilo-class submarines from Russia, according to the DoD, along with Russian Sovremenny-class destroyers. The 1995–96 Taiwan Strait crisis, when the US sent two carrier groups into the area, is widely seen as sharpening Beijing’s determination to be able to keep outside navies at a distance.
Domestic designs took over from the 2000s, built in small, steadily improving batches before mass production in the 2010s. The Type 056 corvette shows the tempo. According to CRS, 72 were built across four shipyards between 2013 and early 2021, about eight a year. From the end of 2008, anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden gave the navy its first sustained experience of operating thousands of miles from home. A 2015 defence white paper made the shift official, adding “open seas protection” to the defence of China’s offshore waters.
CSIS estimates that about 70 per cent of Chinese warships were launched after 2010, against about 25 per cent of US Navy ships. Newer is not automatically better, but most of China’s fleet was designed for this century’s missiles and sensors.
Three carriers and a drone ship
The first carrier, Liaoning, began life as the unfinished Soviet Varyag. Ukraine sold it in 1998, it was towed to Dalian in 2002 and it was commissioned in 2012. Like the second carrier, Shandong, built at Dalian and commissioned in 2019, it launches aircraft from a ski-jump bow. That limits how much fuel and weaponry its J-15 fighters can carry.
The third carrier, Fujian, is a different class of ship. Built at the Jiangnan Shipyard in Shanghai and launched in June 2022, it has an estimated full-load displacement of about 80,000 tonnes and uses electromagnetic catapults. Only the US Navy’s new Ford-class carriers share that technology. Fujian began sea trials in May 2024 and was commissioned on 5 November 2025 at Sanya on Hainan, with Xi Jinping presenting the flag. The Pentagon says its air wing will likely include J-35 stealth fighters, KJ-600 early-warning aircraft and J-15 variants.
Commissioning is not full capability. In June 2026 the analyst Ying Yu Lin wrote in The Diplomat that China had “entered the age of three carriers, but not yet the age of fully mature three-carrier operations.” He pointed to shortages of carrier-qualified pilots and deck crews across two different launch systems. Shandong spent much of the first half of 2026 in dry dock at Yulin, while Liaoning completed a 40-day deployment across the South China Sea and western Pacific that ended on 22 June. A fourth carrier, usually called the Type 004, is taking shape at Dalian. Satellite imagery from August 2026 analysed by The War Zone shows a hull already around 320 metres long, with structures that look like reactor compartments. Nuclear propulsion has not been officially confirmed. The DoD says the PLAN aims to have nine carriers by 2035.
Alongside the carriers sits one of the navy’s most unusual new ships. The Type 076 Sichuan, launched at Shanghai’s Hudong-Zhonghua shipyard on 27 December 2024, is an amphibious assault ship of more than 40,000 tonnes. It has twin islands and is the first amphibious assault ship to be fitted with an electromagnetic catapult and arresting gear, designed to operate large fixed-wing drones as well as helicopters and landing craft. It began sea trials in November 2025. As of late September 2026 it had not been commissioned: Chinese state media in July described the catapult, arresting gear and deck markings as complete, and the South China Morning Post reported it in final sea trials in late August. It will join the Type 075 amphibious assault ships, the first of which entered service in 2021.
Destroyers and submarines
The backbone of the modern surface fleet is two destroyer classes. The Type 055 displaces roughly 12,000–13,000 tonnes and is large enough that the Pentagon classes it as a cruiser. It carries 112 vertical launch cells. The ninth and tenth ships, Dongguan and Anqing, were shown in service in March 2026, bringing the class to ten, with more reported under construction. The smaller Type 052D has been built in far greater numbers since 2014. The South China Morning Post reported in September 2026 that open-source counts put the class at about 35 ships. In July 2026 state television showed a 052D firing a YJ-20 hypersonic anti-ship missile, a weapon previously associated with the Type 055. A new frigate, the Type 054B, entered service in early 2025.
Beneath the surface, China is still behind. The DoD’s 2024 figures, quoted by CRS, credit the PLAN with six nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, six nuclear-powered attack submarines and 48 diesel or air-independent-propulsion attack boats. It expects the force to reach 65 by 2025 and 80 by 2035. New nuclear boats are coming from an expanded yard at Huludao in Liaoning province, including a guided-missile variant of the Shang class. A 2023 US Naval War College report argued that China was “on the verge of producing world-class nuclear-powered submarines”, though other US analysts point to lingering weaknesses in propulsion and quieting. There have been setbacks too: the December 2025 Pentagon report links procurement corruption to capability shortfalls, “possibly” including the pier-side sinking of the first Zhou-class submarine before its sea trials.
The shipyard advantage
The figure that most alarms American planners is not about warships at all. An unclassified US Navy intelligence slide, widely reported from 2023, suggested that China has about 230 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States, measured in gross tonnage. CRS adds an important caveat. The measure mainly reflects capacity to build commercial cargo ships, and China’s ability to build complex combat systems “may be far less than 230 times” America’s, though probably still well above parity.
That commercial base is still a strategic asset. The same state-owned groups that turn out container ships also build warships, and China’s rise to dominate the world’s commercial shipyards has given the navy access to skilled labour, steel, dry docks and supply chains at enormous scale. Jiangnan’s yard on Changxing Island near Shanghai produced Fujian and many destroyers, and the Pentagon notes that China has built major new yards over the past decade, including on Changxing, to replace older ones. Dalian builds carriers and destroyers, Hudong-Zhonghua builds amphibious ships, and Huludao builds submarines.
The contrast is stark: CRS notes that US yards have delivered only about 1.2 Virginia-class submarines a year since 2022, against a goal of two. In wartime, a larger industrial base can also repair and replace ships faster, which is why analysts worry most about a long conflict.
Bases beyond the near seas
China opened its first overseas military base in Djibouti, at the mouth of the Red Sea, in August 2017. Its stated purpose is supporting anti-piracy and protecting Chinese citizens and investments. The Pentagon’s December 2025 report observed that the base had “minimal participation” in those tasks, had not supported evacuations or the Red Sea crisis, and served mainly to sustain a regional presence and military diplomacy.
The second site is at Ream in Cambodia, on the Gulf of Thailand. China funded a major upgrade of the base. Two Chinese corvettes became the first ships to dock at its new pier in December 2023, and according to the DoD, two PLAN warships were then kept there continuously on rotation. In April 2025 Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet and a PLA delegation inaugurated a joint logistics and training centre. Both governments deny that Ream is a Chinese base, and Cambodia has since welcomed other navies. Japanese warships called soon after the inauguration, and in January 2026 the USS Cincinnati became the first US warship to moor there, about 150 metres from two Chinese warships. The Pentagon reports Chinese interest in further facilities, including on Africa’s Atlantic coast. Commercial ports built or operated by Chinese firms, however, are not the same thing as naval bases.
The coast guard and the maritime militia
Much of China’s day-to-day maritime pressure is not applied by the navy. The China Coast Guard, which the DoD calls “the largest maritime law enforcement fleet in the world”, sits under the People’s Armed Police. It takes the lead in what Beijing calls “rights protection” in disputed waters, with the navy “over the horizon”. The coast guard’s cutters include what the Pentagon describes as the world’s largest coast guard ship. A 2021 law, backed by a 2024 regulation, authorises it to board foreign vessels and detain foreigners in waters China claims.
Alongside it is the China Maritime Militia. These are fishing and other civilian vessels whose crews can be mobilised for state tasks, reporting ultimately to the Central Military Commission. The DoD records militia and coast guard crews clashing with Philippine personnel at Second Thomas Shoal in June 2024, when a Filipino sailor lost a thumb. It also notes coast guard ships ramming Philippine vessels at Sabina Shoal, and some militia boats being painted white to resemble coast guard cutters. This grey-zone model makes it hard for smaller neighbours to push back without appearing to escalate.
The approach has its own risks. On 11 August 2025, near Scarborough Shoal, the coast guard cutter Nanyu collided with the PLAN destroyer Guilin as both chased the Philippine Coast Guard vessel BRP Suluan. The cutter’s bow was wrecked. A year later, in August 2026, China honoured two coast guard officers, aged 21 and 25, who died in what it called a “maritime rights protection operation” that day. It was the first official admission of fatalities.
Around Taiwan and in the South China Sea
Taiwan is the scenario the PLAN is primarily built for. According to the Pentagon, in 2024 China kept five to nine naval ships around Taiwan on about 75 per cent of days, up from 46 per cent in 2023 and 27 per cent in 2022. Large named exercises have become regular events. Joint Sword-2024B in October 2024 put a carrier group east of Taiwan and brought coast guard ships fully around the island for the first time. Strait Thunder-2025A followed in April 2025. Justice Mission-2025, on 29–30 December 2025, involved 13 or 14 navy ships and 14 or 15 coast guard vessels each day, according to Taiwan’s defence ministry, as well as four amphibious ships east of the island and rocket fire into the sea to the north and south.
The Pentagon also points to a gap. It sees no sign that China is significantly expanding its tank landing ships and landing craft, “despite almost certainly not having” the lift for a large-scale amphibious assault on Taiwan. It notes the PLAN’s training with civilian roll-on/roll-off ferries as a possible stop-gap. Showing that you can blockade an island is not the same as being able to invade it.
The navy’s reach is also stretching further. In June 2025 Japan’s defence ministry reported Liaoning and Shandong operating in the western Pacific at the same time for the first time, with Liaoning passing beyond the second island chain near Minamitorishima. In June 2026 Fujian passed through the Taiwan Strait, a transit Beijing called routine training. China’s navy routinely describes such deployments as annual exercises “not aimed at any specific country”, while neighbours from Japan to the Philippines see them as signals aimed squarely at them.
What it means
From Beijing’s point of view, the build-up is what a great trading power does. China depends on sea lanes for energy and exports, has unresolved disputes on its doorstep, and remembers a nineteenth century when foreign navies sailed up its rivers at will. Chinese officials like to cite the Ming treasure fleets of Zheng He as evidence of a peaceful maritime tradition; the fleets’ abandonment is also read as a warning about turning away from the sea.
From the perspective of Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan and the United States, what matters is less the global total than the local balance. Inside the first island chain, China can bring most of its fleet, its coast guard, its militia and its shore-based missiles to bear, while the US must bring forces from across an ocean and divide them between other commitments. That is why a navy that trails in tonnage can still change the regional balance.
There are real limits. China’s fleet is untested in combat, its submarines lag well behind America’s and its carrier aviation is young. Anti-corruption investigations have reached the shipbuilding industry and senior officers, including Admiral Miao Hua, a former navy political commissar. America’s allies add fleets of their own; Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force alone operates dozens of destroyers. And projections of growth assume an economy and leadership that keep prioritising the navy.
Yet the direction is hard to dispute. Within a single career, the PLAN has gone from coastal defence to catapult carriers, 10,000-tonne destroyers, a base on the Red Sea and operations beyond the second island chain. It is the largest navy in the world by the measure most people quote. It is not yet the most powerful, and whether it ever becomes so will depend as much on shipyards, training and politics as on the number of hulls.
