This leaves a very important detail: The current US control of the Pacific Ocean. The US has a lot of bases on pacific. Guam, Wake Island, Hawaii, smaller bases on small atolls and ahem, Japan. As long as China can not fight the US back to the shores of California it won't have a real conventional deterrence. Being able to forcefully eject the US from West Pacific is the minimum level of capability China should aim for. You need a lot of carriers for that. A lot. I think China will build as many as 14 carriers by mid-2050s. Until then, carriers can be used for defense too by using them to push the boundary of A2/AD bubble further. They can be especially useful in protecting ASW aircraft (which is the current doctrine BTW). Unless China wants to deal with fuel needs of 10+ 100,000 ton ships it will use nuclear propulsion.
Note: Unlike China, a blockade would break Japan fast. It is a very densely populated island that is very poor in resources. Long distance force projection is how China could tame Japan.
14 carriers would be a bit much, especially if you extrapolate the escort and support fleets needed for that many carriers.
The idea of trying to hit California with carrier fleets is too far fetched at present, I think the PLA’s ambitions are both more modest and daring at the same time.
The ultimate goal would be to take the first island chain and shatter the second. The first island chain can be taken and essentially used as springboards to roll up all the islands without needing to reply completely on naval aviation similar to allied strategy against Japan during WWII.
Those seized islands would be built up and maybe even extended similar to SCS islands into a string of fortresses to safeguard China’s mainland coast while also forming a noose around Japan’s neck as part of a long term starvation strategy to bring them to heel. At the same time, those first island chain bases would be used to continuously strike at US assets deployed to the second island chain to attrition and trap them in a massively unfavourable fight. American pride and ambition would not allow them to simply abandon those islands, but the tyranny of distance makes that an extremely disadvantageous location to try to hold, for both sides. But with first island chain fortresses, China could launch attacks against those second island chain bases and any convoys headed to Japan more or less indefinitely with keeping the mainland essentially safe from attack.
That’s how I foresee the AR of Taiwan to finish, in a weird stalemate between a fully hot and Cold War where China secures it’s heartland while slowly starving Japan to oblivion and fights American forces all along the second island chain for as long as America wants to continue to fight. If America gives up and pulls out of the second island chain, I think China will still not move in to take those islands and instead would be content to leave them unoccupied as a sort of no-man’s land buffer zone, as they would face the unbearable logistics burden if they tried to garrison those islands.
For such a strategy, you don’t need a stupid number of carriers, since like the SCS, the burden of defence and offensive will be shared between naval and land based forces. The minimum carrier fleet the PLAN would need is what is needed to take the first islands and keep them, and the massive construction fleets secured until the islands can be expanded into self sustaining fortresses.
For that kind of operation, carriers are actually not much more important than LHDs and LHAs, since China’s A2AD forces and assets would already be able to do the lion share of the heavy lifting in terms of keeping US surface and carrier fleets at arms length. The bigger challenge will probably be ASW, as I foresee the USN relying disproportionately on its sub fleets for offensive operations as Chinese AShBMs and hypersonics keeps USN surface fleets well back.
USN carrier ops will probably involve mostly long range missile spams, while PLAN carrier ops would focus mostly on defending against those attacks.
How many such island bases China may want to build up at the same time will probably be the primary factor in determining how many carriers they need.
