Liaoning

History: Liaoning (16; Chinese: 辽宁舰; pinyin: Liáoníng Jiàn) is a Chinese Type 001 aircraft carrier. The first aircraft carrier commissioned into the People's Liberation Army Navy Surface Force, she was originally classified as a training ship, intended to allow the Navy to experiment, train and gain familiarity with aircraft carrier operations. Following upgrades and additional training in late 2018, Chinese state media announced that the ship would shift to a combat role in 2019.

Originally laid down in 1985 for the Soviet Navy as the Kuznetsov-class aircraft carrier Riga, she was launched on 4 December 1988 and renamed Varyag in 1990.[10] After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, construction was halted and the ship was put up for sale by Ukraine. The stripped hulk was purchased in 1998 and towed to the Dalian naval shipyard in northeast China.

The ship was rebuilt and commissioned into the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) as Liaoning on 25 September 2012. Its Chinese ship class designation is Type 001. In November 2016, the political commissar of Liaoning, Commodore Li Dongyou, stated that Liaoning was combat-ready.

Class: The Type 001 carrier class consists of a single example: Liaoning. It was originally ordered by the Soviet Union and laid down in 1985, but after the Chinese acquired the hull in 1998, it was so completely redesigned that it is effectively a new class.

Nationality: China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a unitary sovereign state in East Asia and the world's most populous country, with a population of around 1.404 billion. Covering approximately 9.6 million square kilometres (3.7 million square miles), it is also the world's second-largest country by land area and third- or fourth-largest by total area, also has the most neighbor countries in the world. Governed by the Communist Party of China, it exercises jurisdiction over 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four direct-controlled municipalities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing), and the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau, also claiming sovereignty over Taiwan.

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