Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – When four Chinese vessels joined with Russian ships earlier this month in joint naval drills in the Sea of Japan, few eyebrows were raised.Moscow and Beijing have been reinforcing their military partnership in recent years as they seek to counterbalance what they see as the United States-led global order.But what did raise eyebrows among defence analysts and regional governments had occurred several weeks earlier when China sent its aircraft carriers into the Pacific together for the first time.Maritime expert and former United States Air Force Colonel Ray Powell described the “simultaneous deployment” of China’s two aircraft carriers east of the Philippines as a “historic” moment as the country races to realise Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ambition of having a world-class navy by 2035.“No nation except the US has operated dual carrier groups at such distances since [World War II],” said Powell, director of SeaLight, a maritime transparency project of the Gordian Knot Center at Stanford University.“While it will take years for China’s still-nascent carrier capabilities to approach that of America’s, this wasn’t just a training exercise – it was China demonstrating it can now contest and even deny US access to crucial sea lanes,” Powell told Al Jazeera.China’s state-run news agency Xinhua described the exercise by the aircraft carriers as a “far-sea combat-oriented training”, and the state-affiliated Global Times reported that China was soon poised to enter the “three-aircraft-carrier era”, when its …
