In wartime, the Chinese carriers could protect a landing force crossing the Taiwan Strait and launch air strikes against Taiwanese forces from different directions. They could sail into the Pacific Ocean to confront American carrier groups steaming to Taiwan’s defense.

Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council is most worried about the latter. In an August report, MAC anticipated Chinese aircraft carrier operations against Taiwan would “focus more on denying the US military.”

Rival carrier battle groups clashing across the vastness of the Pacific Ocean might evoke the most apocalyptic naval battles of World War II’s Pacific campaign, but there’s a key difference. During World War II, the Japanese and American fleets were – for the first few years of the war, at least – roughly evenly matched in terms of carriers and carrier planes. 

Yes, the US Navy won a series of close victories in carrier-on-carrier battles in the Coral Sea and around Midway Island in 1942, but it wasn’t until America finally brought its industrial superiority to bear on the conflict that the US fleet began to deploy many more, and much better, flattops and planes. That new advantage was most evident in the 1944 Battle of the Philippine Sea, a veritable bloodbath for the Japanese.

Eighty years later, the Americans hold a huge advantage in carriers and planes – one that China would struggle to overcome, even with its huge shipbuilding industrial base and breakneck naval modernization. 

Eleven carriers is a lot of carriers. And while not all American flattops are available at any given time, and some belong to the Atlantic Fleet, it should be possible for the Pentagon to surge five or six carriers for a war over Taiwan.

Moreover, USN carriers are bigger than Chinese carriers. The new USS Gerald R Ford displaces more than 100,000 tons and carries an air wing with more than 60 aircraft including dozens of F/A-18 and F-35 fighters armed with long-range missiles. All American flattops have four catapults for launching their fighters rapidly at maximum weight with full loads of weapons and fuel.

PLAN carriers are smaller: Liaoning and Shandong displace around 60,000 tons. Fujian displaces around 70,000 tons. Their air wings are smaller and, most critically, only Fujian has catapults – three of them – and can launch J-15 and (eventually) J-35 fighters at max weight.

All that is to say, that the Chinese sailed three carriers at the same time is impressive – and ominous for Taiwan. But it’s less impressive than the much bigger fleet the Americans could sail toward Taiwan. And that’s good news for the Taiwanese.

Time is the variable. The PLA routinely masses forces around Taiwan without attacking Taiwan in order to make it difficult for Taiwanese intelligence to tell the difference between peacetime exercise and wartime mobilization.

“The scale of activity is getting larger and larger, and so it is harder to discern when they might be shifting from training to a large exercise – and from an exercise to war,” Wellington Koo Li-hsiung, Taiwan’s defense minister, said recently.

Just one American carrier is permanently stationed in the western Pacific – USS George Washington, based in Japan. It could take weeks to deploy additional carriers. If the Chinese attacked suddenly at a moment when all their carriers were at sea, they’d have a temporary advantage.

That’s the nightmare scenario for Taiwan – and those nations with important economic ties to the island democracy, which is a lot of nations due to Taiwan’s huge microchip fabrication industry. Chinese carrier movements are of interest to us all.