The Chinese navy appears to be gearing up to invade someone

But at just 650 feet from bow to stern, the vessel is small for an assault ship. A Type 075 is 760 feet long. A Type 076 is even longer at 850 feet. More to the point, however, the mystery ship is redundant. Why would the Chinese need a third type of big-deck amphibious ship?

The most chilling answer is that Chinese officials anticipate losing a lot of ships in any attempt to land troops in Taiwan – and they’re planning in advance to replace sunk or damaged Type 075s and Type 076s with smaller assault ships they can build fast and cheap. Or they may want to add numbers to their invasion fleet as quickly as possible.

Guangzhou Shipyard International, the yard in question, does appear to be building the first copy of that apparent small assault ship type rather quickly. Shugart noted it in satellite imagery going back “a few months” prior to October. In those few months, workers completed the ship’s hull and deck.

In shipbuilding terms, that’s fast. It took Chinese shipbuilders a year to complete the first Type 075; construction of the Type 076 might also take a year.

The Chinese could be forgiven for assuming their landing forces might take heavy casualties in a direct assault on Taiwan. The new Taiwanese coastal defense force is building up a powerful arsenal, adding 400 American-made Harpoon anti-ship missiles on 100 truck-mounted launchers cued by 25 radars. It already had large numbers of Hsiung Feng Taiwan-made anti-shipping missiles, likewise kept in hardened bases and mobile for easy dispersal.

Those missile launchers, tucked into hard-to-spot hillside redoubts, could ride out the bombardment that would surely precede a Chinese invasion attempt – and then target the invaders when they’re most vulnerable: while crossing the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait in Type 076s, Type 075s and other amphibious and transport ships.

The Ukrainian navy needed just two Neptune anti-ship missiles to sink the 612-foot Russian missile cruiser Moskva in the Black Sea in April 2022. Chinese naval planners are no fools. They know their own ships could be equally vulnerable. Sea-skimming missiles like the Neptune, Hsiung Feng and Harpoon can be difficult to detect, and even more difficult to intercept.

So if that mystery vessel is a cheap assault ship, it may be China’s answer to the severe losses its invasion forces would probably sustain, mounting an assault through a hail of missiles.

It’s a big if, however. Shuggart concluded the ship near Guangzhou might not be an assault ship at all, but rather a research vessel capable of supporting helicopters. He even located an artist’s rendering of a “research” carrier that closely matches what he saw in that satellite imagery.

But it wouldn’t really matter what the ship may be called or what branch of the Chinese government it’s assigned to. It would still be useful in the event of an invasion.