Liaoning, Anhui, and the Missiles Behind Them: Reading China’s Carrier–Amphibious Exercise

Naval Sector – When China’s Liaoning carrier strike group returned to its home port of Qingdao on June 22, 2026, after a deployment of roughly 40 days, Chinese state media added a single line that drew more attention than the voyage itself: during the deployment, the carrier group had conducted joint exercises in the Western Pacific with an amphibious assault ship group led by the Type 075 vessel Anhui. It was, by most accounts, the first time a Type 075 had trained in depth alongside a Chinese carrier — and that pairing, more than any single ship, is what regional observers have been parsing ever since.

What is confirmed

The factual spine of this story is unusually well-documented, because it was tracked independently by Japan. The Liaoning group deployed on May 19, pre-announced by Chinese state media as routine training. According to releases from Japan’s Joint Staff Office, the group comprised the carrier Liaoning, the cruiser Wuxi, the destroyer Kaifeng, the frigate Luohe, and the fast combat support ship Hulunhu. On May 22, Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force sighted the amphibious assault ship Anhui (hull 33) and the frigate Anyang sailing southeast about 110 km southwest of Kume Island, transiting the waters between Okinawa and Miyako Island into the Philippine Sea.

Over the deployment, Japan tracked the carrier conducting some 260 aircraft takeoffs and landings, shadowed the group with the destroyer JS Asahi and P-3C patrol aircraft, and scrambled fighters in response to flight operations. Chinese state media later confirmed the carrier-amphibious joint training explicitly, calling it “system integration training.” Analysts also flagged another first: the frigate Luohe is a new Type 054B, and this appears to be that class’s debut deployment with a carrier group.

Why pairing a carrier with an amphibious ship matters

The interest here is not in either ship alone — it is in the combination. A carrier’s air wing wins control of the sea and sky: intercepting aircraft, striking ships, and holding a protective bubble over a wide area. An amphibious assault ship like the Anhui moves force ashore — its flat deck and well dock can carry dozens of helicopters, air-cushion landing craft, assault vehicles, and marines — but on its own it is vulnerable without air cover.

Chinese military commentator Du Wenlong, speaking on CCTV, called the combination capable but demanding, noting that coordinating sea control, air control, and support for a landing force under threat is extremely difficult — a notably candid framing of this as a capability still being built. The pairing draws scrutiny because of its obvious relevance to amphibious operations against islands: a carrier clearing the air and sea while an amphibious group puts troops ashore beneath that umbrella. Western and regional analysts have tied it directly to a potential Taiwan or South China Sea contingency, though Beijing described the deployment only as routine training.

The bigger frame: the carrier may not be the main act

Here is where much of the Western-style analysis — including, in fairness, the framing earlier in this article — can mislead by measuring China’s navy against the wrong yardstick. Judging this deployment by whether a carrier group could survive a blue-water duel with the US Navy assumes China intends to fight that way. Many Chinese strategists would say it does not.

In China’s anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) concept, the decisive instrument is not the carrier but the land-based anti-ship ballistic missile. The DF-21D, with a reported range of around 1,500–2,000 km, covers the First Island Chain; the DF-26, at roughly 4,000 km, reaches the Second Island Chain and Guam. Fired from road-mobile launchers that are extremely hard to locate before launch, and arriving at hypersonic speed with maneuvering warheads, they are designed to do one thing: push US carriers back, away from the fight, before they can get close. Under that logic, China’s own carrier and amphibious groups are not meant to slug it out with the US Navy in the open Pacific. They are meant to operate inside the bubble those missiles create — in near-seas waters notionally swept clear of US carriers — doing exactly the kind of island-landing support the Liaoning-Anhui pairing was practicing.

And the missile threat is not land-based alone. The same family of weapons now goes to sea and air: the YJ-21, a ship-launched hypersonic anti-ship missile reported to exceed Mach 10, fits the vertical-launch cells of Type 055 and 052D destroyers — the Type 055 Wuxi escorting Liaoning on this very deployment is such a platform — and derivatives arm H-6 bombers and can be carried by submarines. The design intent is saturation from every axis: land, sea, air, and undersea all able to throw hypersonic missiles into the same patch of ocean, multiplying the defender’s problem. This layered threat is real, and Western planners take it very seriously.

The unverified link the whole system hangs on

But every one of these platforms — the road-mobile DF-21D, the Type 055’s salvo, the air- and submarine-launched variants — depends on the same unproven step. A missile, however fast, however numerous, has to be told where a moving carrier is, in real time, and given updates as that carrier races and turns across open ocean. That “kill chain” — the satellites, over-the-horizon radars, and scouts that find, fix, and continuously track a maneuvering carrier strike group, then feed coordinates to the missile — is the hard part, and it is the part China has never publicly demonstrated under realistic conditions.

Chinese tests have shown the missiles can fly and land in a target area; what they have not shown is a hit on a defended, maneuvering warship under jamming, decoys, and interception — a fundamentally harder problem than striking a stationary barge. Firing more missiles at once helps defeat the defender’s interceptors, but it does nothing to solve the prior problem of locating the target: a salvo aimed with stale coordinates is still a salvo of misses. The honest assessment, and the one serious Western analysts keep returning to, is that the threat is genuine and should not be underestimated — but the decisive link in the chain remains behind a veil.

The limits still worth stating plainly

Two further constraints keep this deployment in proportion. The hardware shown still carries real limits: unlike the US Navy’s Wasp- and America-class ships, the Type 075 cannot operate fixed-wing aircraft, and the Liaoning uses a ski-jump rather than catapults, capping the weight and range of its aircraft — land-based YY-20 tankers were reportedly used to extend its fighters’ reach. China’s newer catapult-equipped Fujian points toward closing that gap, but this force is the current generation.

And China was not operating in an empty ocean. During the same period two US carriers, Nimitz and George Washington, were in the South China Sea and Philippine Sea, and the US-led RIMPAC exercise was getting underway in Hawaii. Japan, for its part, tracked the entire Chinese deployment closely enough to publish ship positions, photographs, and sortie counts — evidence that the island chain’s surveillance net was working, not collapsing, even as China reached further into the Pacific than before.

What it adds up to

China’s navy is practicing a more sophisticated form of integrated operations, further from home, as routine rather than a one-off — and it is doing so as the cutting edge of a layered missile system designed to keep US forces at arm’s length. That is a real and consequential shift, and Chinese analysts are right that it widens the PLA Navy’s options. It is also a system whose most important link is still unproven, taken under constant allied surveillance, against hard hardware limits, in a Western Pacific where US and allied forces are operating in equal measure. The Liaoning-Anhui pairing is a genuine marker in a long, unfinished shift — the most accurate reading is neither the triumphant one nor the dismissive one, but the one that holds the real capability and the real uncertainty in view at the same time.

Sources: Based on releases from Japan’s Joint Staff Office, reporting by USNI News, Naval News, The War Zone, and other open-source defense outlets, and commentary carried by Chinese state media (CCTV, Xinhua) and regional press. Missile specifications are open-source estimates. Ship movements and sortie figures are drawn from Japanese tracking and Chinese state-media confirmation.