On April 21, Beijing time, China’s CCTV aired news footage of new PLAN ships participating in actual combat training, with the recently commissioned Type 055 13,000-ton destroyer Anshan and Wuxi participating in combat training. These are the fourth and fifth Type 055 destroyers confirmed to be in service after Nanchang, Lhasa and Dalian.
Reports show that not long ago, a ship training center of the PLA Navy organized a number of destroyers to form a formation to conduct actual combat training such as night main guns against the sea and secondary guns against air, and joint search and rescue of ships and aircraft. “Type 055 destroyers: Lhasa, Anshan and Wuxi are the main combat ships of the Chinese Navy that have been inducted into the Navy for a short period of time, and they closely follow the future combat tasks, environment and opponents of the new type of ships, pay close attention to basic training, highlight combat-oriented training and strengthen formalized assessment.”
PLA Navy Wuxi Captain Zhao Shugan said, “We now have a full training assessment, from leaving the dock to leaning against the dock, the whole process is an assessment. We must respond to emergencies anytime, anywhere, and immediately increase the deployment level after discovering danger. Sea and air situations will be dealt with.”
On April 23, 2021, in a military port in Sanya, Hainan, the Navy’s three main warships – Long March 18, Dalian ship, Hainan ship were collectively handed over into the fleet, creating a new speed for the entry of the new PLA Navy ships.
Li Guoqiang, chief of staff of a naval training center, pointed out that “the more types and models of new incoming ships in training, the higher the degree of informatization, the stricter the standard requirements, the more the group training should focus on the mission, aiming at being able to fight.”
Type 055 destroyer is the first over 10,000-ton destroyer developed and built by China, it has broken through the overall design of large ships, information integration, assembly and construction of a series of key technologies, equipped with new anti-aircraft, anti-missile, anti-ship, anti-submarine weapons, with strong information perception, anti-aircraft anti-missile and sea strike capabilities.
On January 12, 2020, the launching ceremony of Nanchang, the first ship of the PLA Navy’s Type 055 destroyer, was held at a military port in Qingdao. The entry of the ship marks the leap from the third generation to the fourth generation of destroyers of the PLA Navy. On March 2, 2021, the second Type 055 guided-missile destroyer Lhasa officially joined the Chinese Navy.