Posted on 06/29/2005 5:33:55 PM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
/begin my translation
China Secretly Constructing an Aircraft Carrier
China recently completed the final design for an Chinese aircraft carrier, and start in early August to construct it in secret at Jiang-nan Shipyard, Zhang-xing Island near Shanghai, reported the June 29th issue of Hong Kong Economic Daily(Jing-ji-ri-bao,) quoting (Chinese) high-level military sources.
Costing 3 billion yuan(390 million dollars), which takes up 3% of Chinese military budget, this carrier, due to be completed next year if everything goes well, has top speed 30 knots per hour and its maximal displacement is 78,000 ton. It is equipped with Russian engines and radars.
It will carry 54 fighter planes and 13 anti-submarine helicopters, and the introduction of latest Russian fighters(Su-33) is also in the works. When it would be in service in 2008, it is expected to boost Chinese naval strength.
The paper reports, "Zhang Guang-qin, vice minister of the Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense, denied the rumor that a carrier is under construction. However, he emphasized it is the sacred duty of the Chinese navy to safeguard the country's sovereignty of territorial waters. It is in this context which they go for the construction of the carrier."
(Song Ui-dal, reporting from Hong Kong)
/end my translation
We did. Not very well, but we did. The F-14A dates the F/A-18 by a number of years. In recent years, the 14's, A-6's and A-7's have been replaced by F/A-18's.
Not so secret anymore, eh.... ?
Again, I was ordinance and it's only because of an IG with a bug up his brass that I know anything about damage control.
See, the 6th fleet IG came to visit us on Ike one day and wanted to know why 300 aircrewmen were sitting around with nothing to do except wait for their planes to come back. So, a directive was handed down: all aircrew would be trained in damage control techniques, if they hadn't been already. So, when we hit Norfolk after deployment, we were shipped off to Basic Damage Control school at Willow Grove, Pa. where we spent several weeks learning how to put out shipboard fires. usually in the dark.
I picked up a ton of manuals to read (you can only read the same books so many times during a cruise) and learned a sh*tload about damage control. I had never previously realized just what a science it really is.
Judging from the picture, it would appear that there is not catapult or arrestor gear. I'm assuming VSTOL and VTOL aircraft, which makes that number suddenly seem a lot more possible. Assuming it is armed with SS Missiles, the lack of that equipment alone still saves a lot of space.
Do you mean that supper dooper top of the line, French built Armageddon delivery ship, who got the shakes when all on board washmachines were operating full tilt, and the launch deck for the jets was to short?
That brings back fond memories...
On more series note, just because China is arming it self, do we suppose to shake our selves in our collective cowboy boots? Don't think so!
The Chinese military is a rag tag combo made of Russian left overs, European wanna be military hard ware, and every one in between.
It will take one hell of an effort to coordinate all the said entities to make thinks happened!
Not been a military person me thinks that, the Chinamen won't have a REAL naval military might to challenge US of A for approx 20 Years minimum. USSR comes to mind.
I bet the ships laundry is just enormous!
Remember the picture that a Russian newspaper posted showing the happy Chinese supposedly using the Varyag as a floating amusement park?
And they also make the dynamite used in our bombs....
It depends on the type of accident. Those that get retired due to decapitation from flight operations would make good organ donors. Of course in a war after getting hit with a nuclear tipped torpedo, crispy would actually be rare both in scale and in occurance when ranked with vaporized which would be very well done in a manner of speaking if you want to use culinary terms.
I don't think you can seriously maintain that it is in fact encouraging liberty, economic or otherwise. I am sorry to say, but it is just simply wishful-thinking when you learn how many of the "business people" who run the Chinese "companies" are just as we saw in this very thread about the Varyag scam. Thin pretexts for the PLA and the PLAN and the Chinese Communist Parties's Industry and Communications committees.
They are fronts. When not PLA officers, they are Party Princelings. The Chineses People still can't move of their own volition. And they can't simply quit their jobs. And they can't demand more money. And the "investment" of the foreign companies has to be "joint-ventured" with the Chinese companies and Chinese partners who (supplying only land, and labor)...with the Western companies forced into sacrificing their technology to these partners. Who are then in the ideal position to take over and expel the Westerners after the entire operation is set up and running. GM is currently finding out the hard way what the Chinese really insist on about technology sharing. Chery's R Us.
I also would recommend you take a good hard look at the current Chinese Constitution as well. This is their governing document. And they really follow their Constitution. Quite Unlike our own Supreme Court. Unless our Supreme Court is now following the Chinese Constitution. Which would actually then make a perverted kind of sense....
Re-read what I wrote. You'll notice that I wrote that the Chinese government is perfectlky willing to trade the appearance of economic freedom without the attendant political freedoms. The belief is that if people are chasing money they will not care all that much about political rights. Then again, we're not talking about a country that has a history of anything approaching political rights, are we?
However,this will soon change. How soon, is an open question. More and more Chinese are being exposed to the west and western concepts every day in their business dealings, schooling and in their spare time surfing the web and by watching American television.
The idea was never to "encourage liberty" it was to provide the illusion of liberty without having to conceed political power.
That must mean they will be for sale in your local Wal Mart!!
It's amazing what you remember. I can remember the constant droning noise from the shaft. My rack was directly over the deck above the port shaft on a DDG. It was also next to one of the two AC vents for the whole operations' berthing compartment. :-)
ping
EXCELLENT!..- Mr. Burns..
"carriers are for power projection... Taiwan is purely a self defense situation"
well power projection is also self defense so i fail to see your point
Thank to the FREETRADERS who waged war on China in order to abolish trade restrictions. The finest moment in free trade experimentation:
The Opium Wars
The Opium War, also called the Anglo-Chinese War, was the most humiliating defeat China ever suffered. In European history, it is perhaps the most sordid, base, and vicious event in European history, possibly, just possibly, overshadowed by the excesses of the Third Reich in the twentieth century.
By the 1830's, the English had become the major drug-trafficking criminal organization in the world; very few drug cartels of the twentieth century can even touch the England of the early nineteenth century in sheer size of criminality. Growing opium in India, the East India Company shipped tons of opium into Canton which it traded for Chinese manufactured goods and for tea. This trade had produced, quite literally, a country filled with drug addicts, as opium parlors proliferated all throughout China in the early part of the nineteenth century. This trafficing, it should be stressed, was a criminal activity after 1836, but the British traders generously bribed Canton officials in order to keep the opium traffic flowing. The effects on Chinese society were devestating. In fact, there are few periods in Chinese history that approach the early nineteenth century in terms of pure human misery and tragedy. In an effort to stem the tragedy, the imperial government made opium illegal in 1836 and began to aggressively close down the opium dens.
Lin Tse-hsü
The key player in the prelude to war was a brilliant and highly moral official named Lin Tse-hsü. Deeply concerned about the opium menace, he maneuverd himself into being appointed Imperial Commissioner at Canton. His express purpose was to cut off the opium trade at its source by rooting out corrupt officials and cracking down on British trade in the drug.
He took over in March of 1839 and within two months, absolutely invulnerable to bribery and corruption, he had taken action against Chinese merchants and Western traders and shut down all the traffic in opium. He destroyed all the existing stores of opium and, victorious in his war against opium, he composed a letter to Queen Victoria of England requesting that the British cease all opium trade. His letter included the argument that, since Britain had made opium trade and consumption illegal in England because of its harmful effects, it should not export that harm to other countries. Trade, according to Lin, should only be in beneficial objects.
To be fair to England, if the only issue on the table were opium, the English probably (just probably) would have acceded to Lin's request. The British, however, had been nursing several grievances against China, and Lin's take-no-prisoners enforcement of Chinese laws combined to outrage the British against his decapitation of the opium trade. The most serious bone of contention involved treaty relations; because the British refused to submit to the emperor, there were no formal treaty relations between the two countries. The most serious problem precipitated by this lack of treaty relations involved the relationship between foreigners and Chinese law. The British, on principle, refused to hand over British citizens to a Chinese legal system that they felt was vicious and barbaric. The Chinese, equally principled, demanded that all foreigners who were accused of committing crimes on Chinese soil were to be dealt with solely by Chinese officials. In many ways, this was the real issue of the Opium War. In addition to enforcing the opium laws, Lin aggressively pursued foreign nationals accused of crimes.
The English, despite Lin's eloquent letter, refused to back down from the opium trade. In response, Lin threatened to cut off all trade with England and expel all English from China. Thus began the Opium War.
The War
War broke out when Chinese junks attempted to turn back English merchant vessels in November of 1839; although this was a low-level conflict, it inspired the English to send warships in June of 1840. The Chinese, with old-style weapons and artillery, were no match for the British gunships, which ranged up and down the coast shooting at forts and fighting on land. The Chinese were equally unprepared for the technological superiority of the British land armies, and suffered continual defeats. Finally, in 1842, the Chinese were forced to agree to an ignomious peace under the Treaty of Nanking.
The treaty imposed on the Chinese was weighted entirely to the British side. Its first and fundamental demand was for British "extraterritoriality"; all British citizens would be subjected to British, not Chinese, law if they committed any crime on Chinese soil. The British would no longer have to pay tribute to the imperial administration in order to trade with China, and they gained five open ports for British trade: Canton, Shanghai, Foochow, Ningpo, and Amoy. No restrictions were placed on British trade, and, as a consequence, opium trade more than doubled in the three decades following the Treaty of Nanking. The treaty also established England as the "most favored nation" trading with China; this clause granted to Britain any trading rights granted to other countries. Two years later, China, against its will, signed similar treaties with France and the United States.
Lin Tse-hsü was officially disgraced for his actions in Canton and was sent to a remote appointment in Turkestan. Of all the imperial officials, however, Lin was the first to realize the momentuous lesson of the Opium War. In a series of letters he began to agitate the imperial government to adopt Western technology, arms, and methods of warfare. He was first to see that the war was about technological superiority; his influence, however, had dwindled to nothing, so his admonitions fell on deaf ears.
It wasn't until a second conflict with England that Chinese officials began to take seriously the adoption of Western technologies. Even with the Treaty of Nanking, trade in Canton and other ports remained fairly restricted; the British were incensed by what they felt was clear treaty violations. The Chinese, for their part, were angered at the wholescale export of Chinese nationals to America and the Caribbean to work at what was no better than slave labor. These conflicts came to a head in 1856 in a series of skirmishes that ended in 1860. A second set of treaties further humiliated and weakened the imperial government. The most ignominious of the provisions in these treaties was the complete legalization of opium and the humiliating provision that allowed for the free and unrestricted propagation of Christianity in all regions of China.
The Illustrated Gazatteer of Maritime Countries
China's defeat at the hands of England led to the publication of the Illustrated Gazatteer of Maritime Countries by Wei Yüan (1794-1856). The Gazatteer marks the first landmark event in the modernization of China. Wei Yüan, a distinguished but minor official, argued in the Gazatteer that the Europeans had developed technologies and methods of warfare in their ceaseless and barbaric quest for power, profit, and material wealth. Civilization, represented by China, was in danger of falling to the technological superiority of the Western powers. Because China is a peaceful and civilized nation, it can overcome the West only if it learns and matches the technology and techniques of the West. The purpose of the Gazatteer was to disseminate knowledge about the Europeans, their technologies, their methods of warfare, and their selfish anarchy to learned officials. It is a landmark event in Chinese history, for it was the first systematic attempt to educate the Chinese in Western technologies and culture. This drive for modernization, begun by Lin Tse-hsü and perpetuated by Wei Yüan would gain momentum and emerge as the basis for the "Self-Strengthening" from 1874 to 1895.
(Richard Hooker at world civilisations)
Not so secret if this is being reported, by the way....
Well, if you're a surfer, it has just about the right nose angle for a good board.
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