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China’s military
ChinaMilitary

Chinese military: celebrating workers’ social media photo shows Beijing is likely building new Type 076 giant warship

  • An online image shows workers holding a banner celebrating the finished floor of a new dry dock in Changxing Island shipyard
  • Type 076 expected to function as a helicopter and drone carrier with an eye to conflict in the South China Sea, analyst says

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Workers at the Hudong-Zhonghua shipyard posted a picture on Weibo to mark the end of concreting the floor of a new dry dock in the shipyard on Changxing Island. Photo: Weibo
Minnie Chan

Online imagery and social media postings by workers of China’s top shipbuilder show the country is probably building a next-generation amphibious assault dock equipped with an advanced electromagnetic aircraft launch system, analysts said.

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On Sunday last week, workers at the Hudong-Zhonghua shipyard, a Shanghai-based subsidiary of the China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC), posted a picture on the Weibo social media platform – China’s equivalent of Twitter or X – of themselves celebrating the end of concreting the floor of a new dry dock in the shipyard on Changxing Island.

The photo showed the workers holding a banner marking the completion of engineering work, but it did not specify the date.

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According to Lu Li-shih, a former instructor at the Taiwanese naval academy in Kaohsiung, progress in building the new dry dock suggests China is pressing ahead with the construction of a new giant warship, and that vessel is most likely to be the Type 076 assault dock.

Hudong-Zhonghua shipyard specialises in developing and building amphibious warships for the Chinese navy. It has built all 10 active Type 071 amphibious transport docks and the four advanced Type 075 landing helicopter docks (LHD). The last Type 075 is almost ready to be launched.

The Type 075, which has a displacement of nearly 40,000 tonnes, is slightly smaller than the US Navy’s Tarawa and Wasp-class amphibious assault ships. It is, however, a significant upgrade from its predecessor, the 25,000-tonne Type 071.

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The Type 076, which will be similar in size to the Type 075, is expected to be equipped with the most advanced type of electromagnetic launch system – the technology that is used on the Fujian aircraft carrier – but the catapult system will mainly be used for launching unmanned aerial combat vehicles (UCAVs), according to Beijing-based naval expert Li Jie.

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