Safety comes first. Landing aboard a warship with less than 2 meters of freeboard surely causes a headache to the pilots who have to land on the pad few meters wide and long in any conditions above a still sea with almost no wind. It's easier aboard Arleigh Burke class with much more seaworthiness than a small Type 056 vessel. Korean Incheon class with a pad around 2 meters above the sea level must be a nightmare for any pilot to land and makes those fairly big warships unusable on the high seas or bad weather conditions (for me those warhips look like they're going to be broken in half if the lenght of the wave is big enough). In September of 2013 a tragic accident happened aboard USS William P. Lawrence. That's surely not a a thing you should ignore!
This thing makes Type 056 vessels ugly for me as I stated before with their 'original' silhouette of having the stern at the same level as the bow. PLAN surely would like to see those in the high seas beyond the first island chain (and it happened already a few times) but that's impossible for those ships to operate in the case of war there. But it's much easier for PLAN pilots to do their work in the best conditions that a 90 meters long hull could provide. PLAN is just learning how harsh the waters of the northern Pacific are with probably more than one sailor with broken bones but a real nightmare is to keep up with European navies for which it's normal business to sail in the much worse waters of north Atlantic. US battleships designed for the calm Pacific waters didn't pass the test of those waters during WWII days compared to, for example, British or German standards of the day.
That's a wise decission from Chinese engineers and those who accept the plans in the navy but not a great example of shipbuilding with 'class' (like for examlpe Type 071 surely is - it looks great and does it's work - one of the best looking warships in the world for me!)
