Following the commissioning of its first fully operational Type 055 Class destroyer, the Nanchang, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy has assigned the warship to the North Sea Fleet based in Qingdao. While tensions in the South and to a lesser extent the East China Sea led to considerable speculation that the new 13,000 ton warships would be assigned to the South Sea or East Sea fleets, an assignment to a fleet away from any major hotspots could well be perceived as a means of reducing tensions with potential adversaries. With China’s sole fully operational aircraft carrier the Liaoning also assigned to the North Sea Fleet, it has also been speculated that the new destroyer could have been selected for assignment to this fleet in order to form part of a carrier strike group. The Liaoning for its part completed maintenance and modifications which had lasted more than half a year in January 2019 and was subsequently designated a fully functioning aircraft carrier - a change from its previous role as a training carrier. The North Sea fleet traditionally received China's most advanced warships in the early days of the PLA Navy, namely from 1960 until the mid 1980s, due to the perceived threat of a Soviet invasion and amphibious landings on Chinese coasts. Since then however, capabilities have been more evenly distributed between the PLA Navy's three major fleets. The Type 055 is currently the heaviest destroyer class in the world, and comes with perhaps the most impressive armaments suite of any serving combat vessel in the world. A 112 cell Vertical Launch System (VLS) array provides the warship with an arsenal unrivalled by any other warship of its kind - with access to ten known missile types for anti-ship, anti-submarine, land attack and air defence roles. A multi layered air defence system formed by four complementary surface to air missile types, the HQ-10, HQ-26, HHQ-9B and DK-10A, and multiple close in weapons systems, allows the Type 055 to protect carriers and itself with an effectiveness few rival platforms can match. The warship’s anti ship capabilities are if anything more outstanding, with the YJ-18 anti ship cruise missile retaining a 540km range, 300km warhead and high Mach 3 impact speed - sufficient to tear medium sized warships in half with a single direct hit. The YJ-18, while subsonic, carries a heavier 500kg warhead and can carry out highly precise attacks on enemy warships up to 1000km away - more than triple the range of the Harpoon Next Generation unveiled by Boeing in 2015 to equip U.S. Warships. The new variant of the Harpoon is slower than the YJ-100 and is restricted to a 310km range. A new hypersonic platform, the YJ-XX, is reportedly under development to further enhance the Type 055’s firepower and is expected to enter service in the early 2020s. The Chinese destroyer’s powerful armaments suite is complemented by a multi-function dual band active phased array radar, the Type 346B, which coupled with secondary sensors provides the Type 055 with some of the highest levels of situational awareness of any serving warships. Costing a little under $900 million (CN¥6 billion), the Type 055 Class destroyers are more than 85% cheaper to acquire per warship than their American counterpart the Zumwalt Class - and are considerably cheaper to operate.