For the moment we only see the Liaoning training flight operations, I would guess that soon we will see them doing more training with a group of escorts.
I hope that in a few years when CV-17 is getting ready for flight operations, China will already be using a carrier group based around Liaoning in their fleet exercises and start sending a small CVBG beyond the first island chain (perhaps even into the indian ocean).
What are your ideas about the timing of these next steps ?
I'll be surprised if Liaoning leaves the western pacific on a serious large scale exercise before 2020.
However I do think they will have enough crew and pilots who are experienced enough with flight training and deck operations by 2020 that they could start conducting larger scale exercises and training involving Liaoning, but those would be relatively few and far between, and most of the time Liaoning will be putting more and more batches of deck crew through the basic and initial training of carrier operations instead.
I expect that the larger style exercises you're thinking of will probably begin in greater frequency between the early 2020s and 2025 (i.e.: the period when Liaoning and CV-17 are both in service for a while), because it is probably by that period that the job of training large numbers of experienced deck crew, pilots and ship crew will have been meaningfully fufilled.
Until then, Liaoning and initially CV-17 will probably both spend a good deal of their time training batches of new deck crew, pilots and ship crew successively, so that they can get three fully operational carriers very soon after 002 first enters service (likely 2025 ish), with enough experienced deck crew, pilots and ship crew to fill them up.