Int'l fleet to mark Chinese PLA Navy founding anniversary

More than 40 naval vessels will join a grand international fleet around April 23 in a display to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy, a PLA officer said Friday. The navies of 15 countries have pledged to send ships to the east port city of Qingdao as part of the celebrations and at least28 foreign countries will send delegations, said the officer with the Navy's headquarters. The parade will be staged off Qingdao, the Navy's North Sea Fleet's headquarters in Shandong Province. The celebrations will include seminars attended by senior officers from different navies, technical communication aboard multinational warships and also a sampan race. The Navy's headquarters refused to identify any Chinese warships or submarines joining the display, neither did it confirm whether there would be any aircraft carriers.

However, deputy commander of the North Sea Fleet Wang Fushan said at the annual session of China's legislature last month that an unprecedented display of the PLA's sophisticated warships was expected. The PLA Navy was founded on April 23, 1949 with nine warships and 17 boats obtained after a unit of the Kuomintang's second coastal defense fleet defected to the Communists. The celebrations will be an opportunity for foreign navies to have intensive and close observation of the PLA Navy's facilities and personnel. According to white paper China issued on its national defense in the beginning of this year, from the 1950s to the end of the 1970s the main task of the Navy was to conduct inshore defensive operations. Since the 1980s, the Navy has realized a strategic transformation to offshore defensive operations. Since the beginning of the new century, the Navy has been striving to improve in an all-round way its capabilities of integrated offshore operations, strategic deterrence and strategic counterattacks, and to gradually develop its capabilities of conducting cooperation in distant waters and countering non-traditional security threats.

Through nearly six decades of development, a modern force for maritime operations has taken shape, consisting of combined arms with both nuclear and conventional means of operations. 　　The Navy's two destroyers and one supply ship left on Dec. 26 to the Gulf of Aden and waters off the Somali coast to protect merchant vessels against spreading piracy. On Thursday, the Navy deployed another task force consisting of two warships to relieve the two destroyers after a three-month escort mission in the region, one of the world's busiest shipping lanes, which about 1,000 Chinese vessels pass through each year. "The parade will not only allow foreign countries to observe the warships, but also have a better understanding of the strategies of the Navy as well as the nation," said Major-General Zhang Shiping, a researcher with the PLA's Academy of Military Sciences in Beijing. "The naval display together with the military parade involving all services on the National Day will raise the Chinese people's morale and pride amid the economic slowdown," he added.

Posted in: China,Naval