China’s Fujian, the country’s most advanced aircraft carrier, recently completed a round of flight tests that Beijing has framed as proof the ship is ready for full-deck operations. Yet the carrier’s conventional propulsion system locks it into a dependency on diesel fuel that no amount of electromagnetic wizardry can fix, limiting how far and how long it can operate away from friendly ports. That gap between the Fujian’s cutting-edge launch technology and its old-school power plant is the central tension shaping whether the ship can ever function as a true blue-water warship.
Electromagnetic Catapults Pass Their First Big Test
According to a government statement reposted on the Fujian Provincial People’s Government website, the PLA Navy reported that the Fujian successfully launched and recovered J-35 stealth fighters, J-15T jets, and KJ-600 early-warning aircraft using its electromagnetic catapult and arresting gear. The Navy said the electromagnetic systems had been verified and that the ship demonstrated early full-deck capability, a term that implies all three catapult positions can cycle aircraft in rapid succession. If accurate, this would make the Fujian the second carrier in the world, after the USS Gerald R. Ford, to field an operational electromagnetic launch system at sea and to integrate it with a full suite of carrier-borne combat and support aircraft.
The achievement matters because electromagnetic catapults, known as EMALS, allow a carrier to launch heavier, more diverse aircraft than the older steam-powered systems used on American Nimitz-class ships and the ski-jump ramps on China’s two earlier carriers. The KJ-600, a twin-turboprop airborne early-warning plane roughly analogous in role to the U.S. Navy’s E-2D Hawkeye, is especially significant. Without a catapult, the KJ-600 simply cannot get airborne from a carrier deck with the fuel and sensor load it needs to be effective. Its reported recovery aboard the Fujian signals that Beijing is building the kind of integrated air wing (combining stealth fighters, multirole jets, and dedicated surveillance platforms) that only the United States has fielded at scale, and that is essential for long-range detection, battle management, and airspace control over open ocean.
Conventional Power Caps the Carrier’s Range
Beneath the headline-grabbing catapult tests sits a structural limitation that China cannot retrofit away. The Fujian runs on conventional steam turbines fed by diesel boilers, not a nuclear reactor. That means the ship must periodically break away from operations to refuel, either by pulling into port or by rendezvousing with vulnerable fleet oilers at sea. By contrast, American supercarriers carry enough enriched uranium in their reactors to steam for years without refueling, giving them the endurance to hold station in distant waters for extended deployments and to surge rapidly between theaters without worrying about fuel consumption in the same way a conventionally powered ship must.
Senior Chinese military analyst Wang Qiang has stated that the Fujian uses a Medium-Voltage Direct Current integrated power system, enabling full-system electrification that ties propulsion, ship services, and combat systems into a single electrical architecture. That MVDC grid is what feeds the electromagnetic catapults and could eventually power directed-energy weapons or advanced radar arrays that demand large, rapid pulses of electricity. But a sophisticated electrical distribution network does not change the fact that the energy source itself is finite and burns through fuel at high rates, especially when the ship is generating the massive surges of electricity that EMALS demands during sustained flight operations. The Fujian’s power architecture is advanced for a conventionally powered vessel, yet it amplifies the strain on a fuel supply that nuclear propulsion would render largely irrelevant for the hull’s operational lifetime.
Beijing Is Already Working on a Nuclear Fix
Chinese defense planners appear well aware of the problem. Satellite imagery and Chinese public documents analyzed by the Middlebury Institute, as reported by the Associated Press, point to an active program to develop nuclear propulsion for a future carrier. The documents include tenders, personnel files, environmental impact studies, and citizen complaints tied to Base 909 and a project codenamed “Longwei,” indicating a complex industrial and regulatory effort rather than a purely conceptual study. Procurement records from China’s 701 Institute describe reactor components intended for installation, suggesting the work has moved beyond paper designs and into the stage of acquiring physical hardware for testing or prototyping.
That research, however, does not help the Fujian. Reactor development timelines typically stretch over a decade or more, and fitting a nuclear plant into a hull designed around conventional boilers is not a simple swap of engines. The Fujian will spend its entire operational life burning diesel, constrained by the need to remain within a manageable distance of supply lines and friendly ports. For Beijing, the ship functions as a proving ground for electromagnetic launch technology, integrated power systems, and carrier aviation tactics, but it will never match the strategic reach of a nuclear-powered competitor. Any confrontation scenario in the western Pacific, whether over Taiwan or contested waters in the South China Sea, would force the Fujian to operate within range of friendly refueling infrastructure or accept the risk of running low on fuel during extended operations, a gamble that would be hard to justify in a high-stakes crisis.
Why the Power Gap Matters in a Conflict
The distinction between conventional and nuclear propulsion is not just an engineering curiosity; it shapes how a navy fights and what risks its commanders can take. A carrier that must refuel every few days or weeks, depending on tempo, cannot sustain a distant blockade, hold a defensive perimeter far from shore, or surge to a crisis zone thousands of miles away without pre-positioning tankers along the route. Each of those tankers becomes a high-value target for submarines, long-range bombers, and anti-ship missiles. In a contested environment where adversaries field precision-strike systems designed to disrupt logistics, the refueling chain behind a conventionally powered carrier is a pronounced vulnerability that can limit how aggressively that carrier is used, regardless of how advanced its aircraft or sensors may be.
There is a tension in the official Chinese narrative that deserves scrutiny. Beijing has publicized the Fujian’s catapult tests as evidence of a carrier force that can compete with the U.S. Navy, yet the ship’s propulsion system constrains it to a primarily regional role. The PLA Navy’s statement that the Fujian has achieved early full-deck capability is a real technical milestone, but capability on a calm sea during trials is different from sustained operations under threat, with aircraft cycling day and night while the ship maneuvers to evade detection and attack. The U.S. Navy spent years working through reliability problems with the Ford’s own EMALS before declaring the system ready for deployment, and even then it had to integrate those fixes into a nuclear-powered platform whose endurance underwrites aggressive global operations. Whether China’s version holds up under the stress of high-tempo wartime sorties, and whether a diesel-fed power plant can support that tempo far from home, will determine if the Fujian becomes a true instrument of blue-water power projection or remains a sophisticated but range-limited symbol of China’s naval ambitions.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
