China Has Turned a Small Container Feeder Into an Arsenal Ship

The U.S. Navy wants to compete with China's PLA Navy for sea control in the Western Pacific, which would be essential to defending U.S. allies and protecting American economic interests in the region. But year on year, China's naval fleet continues to grow and modernize, adding more (and more credible) combatant vessels to the order of battle. On Thursday, new open-source imagery from downtown Shanghai showed that the contest could get harder: the photos show that the People's Liberation Army has outfitted a standard container feeder with most of the trappings of a frigate, with an abundance of missile capacity. 

The vessel in question, Zhong Da 79, is a Chinese-flagged container feeder of about 320 feet in length. She has no IMO number or Equasis record, consistent with a purely domestic vessel. AIS data from Pole Star Global shows that she only engages in coastwise trade along China's eastern and southern seaboard.

Zhong Da 79's trackline suggests that the vessel has spent months undergoing a refit over the past year. She put into a small regional shipyard in Longhai in mid-April, emerging again in mid-August. Ever since, she has been moored alongside an industrial pier on the Huangpu River near downtown Shanghai.