Demand For US Arms Reduction In No Way Connected To Our New Aircraft Carrier, Says China

Well, that's the take-off bit sorted

Speaking from the huge flight deck of the Shanga Lang, the People’s Liberation Navy’s newly-unveiled 65,000-tonne aircraft carrier, as it began its sea trials, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao assured the United States that his warning to scale back their expenditure on defence was nothing more sinister than well-intentioned budgeting advice from a concerned friend.

“China is the world’s friend,” he smiled, as the behemoth set course toward Japan. “And the only reason we are quadrupling our defence budget is because we have so much of your money that we simply don’t know what to do with it all. Look at this aircraft carrier. Only a nation with money to burn would waste so much money on a vessel of this size without having any aircraft to equip it with. Well, apart from the British, of course, but they are a notoriously inscrutable race whose reasons - if indeed they even understand such an abstract concept – have always been impossible to fathom.”

The former Soviet hulk will begin launching enthusiastic Chinese pilots off its steam catapults tomorrow. After a decade or two, if all goes well, Chinese defence researchers say they may even develop an aircraft of some sort to put them in – possibly a reverse-engineered Swordfish biplane, which they hope to develop using a rusty old Fleet Air Arm Gannet as a starting point.