US once ruled the seas, now China’s Xi is taking over

China now operates the world’s largest navy, with a battle force of more than 400 ships and submarines, according to official US figures seen by The Wall Street Journal.

That makes China’s fleet about 35 per cent larger than the US Navy by hull count, one of the biggest peacetime naval buildups in modern history, the newspaper said.

Beijing has three aircraft carriers, and Western experts believe a fourth one, under construction, will be nuclear-powered.

This is a sharp turnaround for a navy that had never built or operated a carrier.

In 1998, an entertainment company in Macau bought the Varyag, an unfinished Soviet-era carrier, from a Ukrainian shipyard for $20 million. It said it would turn the ship into a floating casino.

That claim turned out to be a cover. China spent 15 years turning the stripped hulk into a working vessel and learning to launch aircraft from it, an effort some analysts mocked at the time.