Mass production can reduce costs by an order of magnitude. If Chinese want to compete with the USA, which has 12 Nimitz supercarriers, 10 Wasp carriers, 1 America carrier, plus the carriers of the allies they could call upon (2 in the UK, 1 in France, plus the pocket carriers of the Australians, Japanese, and South Koreans which could be like 8), they need IMHO at least 8 CATOBAR carriers, preferably 12 carriers, to make those the size of the Nimitz is IMHO a useless expense. It makes them juicier targets for enemy submarines. Also you have to remember, the USA won WW2 while having smaller carriers than the Japanese. But they produced them in larger numbers. The Japanese took years to build a carrier. They started building a carrier when the war started and when the war was over it still wasn't finished. The USA built several carriers while the war was in progress. In fact they had to rebuild most of the Pacific Fleet they lost at Pearl Harbor while also building massive numbers of transport ships to replace the merchant vessels the Germans sunk in the Atlantic. They did that with mass production of common ship designs over several shipyards.
The Russians had larger ships than the Japanese at the Battle of Tsushima, but they were further away from their supply lines and had worse knowledge of the terrain had poorer tactics and less ships so they still lost.
Fact is we still don't know if a carrier force would survive a near peer war. So spending money on supercarriers seems IMHO to be counter productive.