Read that article posted by manilaboy. Jianghus, which are about the same size and roughly similarly armed, have already been involved in this dispute.
There could be a lot of things that caused it, it's nigh impossible to pass judgement in this at this time, with so little news available...however if it was deliberate, it's interesting because the PI have done the same thing before with a LST.
And yet the PLAN has been pumping out 056's, 054A's, and 052C's like no tomorrow. Clearly they wouldn't build them if they couldn't crew them.
It takes about a year to churn out one from the assembly line and another year to shakedown before handover to the PLAN, in terms of timeline that's about right, if to do it on one-to-one replacement rate. Besides, I prefer a conservative estimates, unlike you who tend to lean on the optimistic figure.
Ships can be moved around and reassigned to different fleets easily, so the pace of buildup of each fleet is IMO more a reflection of the importance the PLAN leadership attaches to them than anything else. NSF's role is defense of the Beijing military region, Bohai Bay, and the Yellow Sea. Despite its seeming importance in having to defend the capital and surrounding waters, it's probably the least important of the three fleets and I predict will be the recipient of the leftovers from the other fleets. ESF's role is Taiwan and the East China Sea, including potential conflicts with Japan, while the SSF is the South China Sea. These two fleets are IMO going to get the lion's share of new ships and will get them first, their ability to move back and forth between different fleets/task forces notwithstanding.
The northeastern region of China is about the most critical heavy industrial hub of China, plus the capital is less than 200km from the coast and port city of Tianjin, the value of NSF is always significant. In fact, defense of capital along is significant, that's why PLA is still keeping 2 of its best armored divisions just outside the capital.
Situations for China is always bad - more like a "bad year" and "not so bad year" for them - only difference is that now they got more money so they can finally invest on the SSF because it has so much potential for expansion, and the need to do so. What's more, back in the day when SSF was such poor sod, modernization was actually easy, just give them "standard, everything new" can streamline the logistics; also, back in the day PI & VN weren't as blatantly aggressive as today's, that gives PLAN time and opportunity to plan things out, instead like the NSF is always under pressure to keep the numbers and capabilities to a degree that they can't really wait for home-brew stuff to be ready, thus the significant number of imports the NSF sports.
