This article on China's sea power gives prominence to China's carrier development, starting out:
In April, on the 69th anniversary of the founding of China’s Navy, the country’s first domestically built aircraft carrier stirred from its berth in the port city of Dalian on the Bohai Sea, tethered to tugboats for a test of its seaworthiness.
“China’s first homegrown aircraft carrier just moved a bit, and the United States, Japan and India squirmed,” a military news website crowed, referring to the three nations China views as its main rivals.
Not long ago, such boasts would have been dismissed as the bravado of a second-string military. No longer.
A modernization program focused on naval and missile forces has shifted the balance of power in the Pacific in ways the United States and its allies are only beginning to digest.
The carriers are a great power projection platform but a vulnerable and expensive part of a sea control mission (yes, those missions are different and should not be conflated).
Now China will have high profile carriers to lose in a war to balance out the image of American carriers in flames.
As I wrote back in 2005, reflecting an unpublished article that the United States Naval Institute purchased from me in 1999:
Our carriers may become the aging gunslingers relying on their reputation from the glory days. As strike platforms in the Navy's network, aircraft carriers will retain a role far decades to come, but even in this role they will face limits. The Navy will need to keep them far from the enemy, closing the range only to strike.
Carriers are the ultimate in platform-centric warfare--even with unmanned aerial combat vehicles. But network-centric warfare is our Navy's future. The gun-armed surface warship, dispersed physically but networked to mass effect at sea or against targets on land, will keep our Navy dominant as it has been for more than sixty years. I love our carriers and their historic exploits are thrilling. But we cannot hang on to them forever when new platforms for a new network are built.
I almost feel sorry for our potential enemies who try to match our carriers (at great expense) just as we supplant them.
Note that the gun-armed ships I mentioned would be armed with long-range rail guns.
Of course, America is only now returning anti-ship missiles to our submarine and surface fleet; while China, is adding carriers to a fleet that already has lots of anti-ship assets on non-carrier platforms (from the initial link):
The carriers attract the most attention but China’s naval expansion has been far broader. The Chinese Navy — officially the People’s Liberation Army Navy — has built more than 100 warships and submarines in the last decade alone, more than the entire naval fleets of all but a handful of nations.
Last year, China also introduced the first of a new class of a heavy cruisers — or “super destroyers” — that, according to the American Office of Naval Intelligence, “are comparable in many respects to most modern Western warships.” Two more were launched from dry dock in Dalian in July, the state media reported.
Last year, China counted 317 warships and submarines in active service, compared with 283 in the United States Navy, which has been essentially unrivaled in the open seas since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
So I'm not actually feeling sorry for China.
It may be that China understands already that carriers are a prestige and power projection platform rather than a sea control platform--a realization that is only starting to make inroad in the United States Navy, it seems (yet there are people who stubbornly think carriers are almost literally unsinkable), long after I first tried to issue the warning.
Heck, in my more suspicious moments, I suspect that the Chinese are building carriers to distract our Navy while China captures Taiwan.
