Chinese aircraft carrier Shandong
2017 Kuznetsov-class aircraft carrier
Shandong (17; Chinese: 山东舰; pinyin: Shāndōng Jiàn) is a Chinese aircraft carrier that was launched on 26 April 2017 for the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) of the People's Republic of China. She is the country's first domestically built aircraft carrier and second in PLAN service after the completion and commissioning of Liaoning, from which she is derived. Shandong's class was initially suspected to be designated Type 001A (as Liaoning received the designation Type 001) but was revealed to be Type 002 at her commissioning ceremony. The class received the NATO reporting name Kuznetsov Mod. ("modified"), since the design of the ship is a modified version of and similar to the Kuznetsov-class aircraft carrier originally made for the Soviet Navy.
History
Construction
Shandong was constructed by the Dalian Shipbuilding Industry, part of the China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, in Dalian, Liaoning province, China. According to the state Xinhua News Agency, manufacture began in November 2013 and laid down the keel for its hull in a dry dock beginning in March 2015.
The Chinese government did not publicly confirm the ship's existence until construction was well under way. Satellite imagery for the defense analysis industry showed the aircraft carrier in the early stages of hull assembly by March 2015. Public photos of a hull with military characteristics at the Dalian shipyard surfaced on the internet the next month.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chinese aircraft carrier Shandong” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.