China is on track to field roughly 70 submarines by 2027, a buildup that would add three nuclear attack submarines, six guided-missile submarines, and two ballistic-missile submarines to the People’s Liberation Army Navy in approximately three years. The projection, drawn from testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in early 2025, reflects a production tempo that no country other than the United States has sustained since the Cold War. It arrives at a moment when the U.S. Navy’s own attack submarine fleet, nominally around 50 boats, is struggling with maintenance backlogs that keep roughly 40 percent of those hulls out of operational service at any given time.
The production surge behind the numbers
The 70-boat estimate emerged during a USCC hearing titled “Part of Your World: U.S.-China Competition Under the Sea,” where witnesses drawing on Office of Naval Intelligence data described Chinese shipyards constructing multiple submarine types simultaneously. The hearing record detailed how yards at Huludao and Wuhan have expanded covered construction halls and drydock capacity, allowing parallel work on nuclear and conventional hulls that would bottleneck facilities in most other countries.
Two programs are driving the expansion’s most consequential gains. The Type 095, China’s next-generation nuclear attack submarine, is expected to be significantly quieter than the current Type 093 Shang-class boats and may carry land-attack cruise missiles in vertical launch cells. The Type 096, referred to in some Pentagon documents as the Zhou-class, is a new ballistic-missile submarine designed to carry the JL-3 intercontinental ballistic missile, which would give Chinese boomers the range to threaten the continental United States from patrol areas closer to home waters, complicating U.S. antisubmarine warfare efforts.
The Pentagon’s 2024 China Military Power Report corroborates the trajectory. A senior defense official, briefing reporters on the report’s findings, confirmed that Chinese shipyards were “actively building across nuclear attack, guided-missile, and ballistic-missile submarine classes at the same time.” The briefing transcript noted that the assessment was based on construction activity observed through early 2024, meaning the actual pace may have advanced further in the months since.
A standing Congressional Research Service report, designated RL33153 and maintained by naval affairs specialist Ronald O’Rourke, compiles these government assessments into a single reference document for lawmakers weighing Navy budget requests. The CRS product explains how shipyard infrastructure investments feed into the production schedules that intelligence analysts use to generate fleet-size forecasts and has been updated periodically as new construction milestones become visible.
Why the count matters less than the mix
A raw number like 70 can mislead without context. China’s submarine fleet as of mid-2026 still includes older diesel-electric boats with limited range and outdated sensors. Some of those hulls serve primarily as training platforms. The critical question is how many of the 70 will be modern nuclear-powered submarines capable of sustained blue-water operations, and on that point the public record is incomplete.
What is clear from the USCC testimony and the CRS synthesis is that the proportion of nuclear boats in the fleet is rising. The addition of three attack submarines, six guided-missile submarines, and two ballistic-missile submarines would represent a qualitative shift, not just a numerical one. Guided-missile submarines, in particular, would give the PLAN a dedicated conventional-strike platform for anti-ship and land-attack missions, a capability the U.S. Navy fields with its four Ohio-class SSGNs, each carrying up to 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles.
Crew training and maintenance capacity remain open questions. A larger fleet demands more qualified submariners, longer pier-side maintenance periods, and deeper weapons stockpiles. The USCC hearing addressed some of these qualitative factors, but quantified data on Chinese submarine crew readiness or torpedo and missile inventories remains sparse in unclassified sources. Some analysts argue that China’s submarine force will remain primarily a regional deterrent, concentrated in the South China Sea and the waters around Taiwan, rather than a global presence. Others point to the PLAN’s growing network of overseas logistics facilities as evidence that longer-range deployments are part of the plan.
The U.S. side of the ledger
The Chinese buildup gains strategic weight partly because of what is happening on the American side. The U.S. Navy’s attack submarine fleet is projected to dip below 50 boats in the coming years as Los Angeles-class hulls retire faster than Virginia-class replacements arrive. Delivery delays at the two yards building Virginias, General Dynamics Electric Boat and Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News Shipbuilding, have pushed the Navy’s own 66-boat submarine goal further into the future. The AUKUS agreement, which commits the United States to sell at least three Virginia-class boats to Australia starting in the early 2030s, adds further pressure to a production line already running behind schedule.
The result is a narrowing numerical gap in the Western Pacific, the theater where any submarine confrontation would most likely occur. Even if Chinese boats remain noisier than their American counterparts on average, quantity has a quality of its own in a contested maritime environment. More submarines mean more patrol areas covered, more missiles available for saturation strikes, and more targets that U.S. and allied antisubmarine forces must track simultaneously.
What to watch through 2027
Several indicators will determine whether the 70-boat projection holds or needs revision. Satellite imagery of Huludao, where China builds its nuclear submarines, will show whether hull sections continue to emerge at the current pace or whether production hiccups slow the timeline. The next edition of the Pentagon’s China Military Power Report, expected later in 2026, should update the submarine count and may provide the first official U.S. assessment of the Zhou-class program’s status.
Equally important are signs of operational maturity. If Chinese submarines begin appearing more frequently in the Indian Ocean, the Western Pacific beyond the first island chain, or under the Arctic ice, that would signal a force transitioning from coastal defense to power projection. Deployment patterns, not just hull counts, will reveal whether the PLAN’s submarine fleet is becoming a strategic instrument or remains a work in progress.
For now, the convergence of the USCC hearing record, the Pentagon briefing, and the CRS report points to a sustained Chinese effort to build a larger, more diverse, and more capable undersea force. The 70-boat figure is a credible estimate, not a certainty, but the direction of the trend is not in serious dispute among U.S. defense officials. The question is no longer whether China is building a formidable submarine fleet. It is whether the United States and its allies can adapt fast enough to maintain the undersea advantage they have held since the Cold War.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
