An interesting looking ship. Assuming this isn't PSed, does anyone know what it is?
This seems to be a scaled-down deployable mock-up of Arleigh Burke-class. Such ship would be used to simulate all the main signatures - RCS, thermal and visual - of an Arleigh Burke destroyer to test PLA information gathering - particularly long range systems and satellites - in natural conditions at sea, in the littorals, in all weather conditions, using combination of different sensors etc. You can also simulate all EW scenarios to see how the signatures change depending on the protective measures being used.
The hangar doesn't match but it's a big problem because it should be relatively easy to analyse and separate returns from each part of the ship and correct it when using long-range sensors that require the mock-up to be to scale, as compared to when using other sensors that attempt to e.g. lock on the hangar from short and medium distances - which requires the hangar and hull above waterline to have specific geometry.
Also it may be used to test recognition of aerial vehicles using the ship so the hangar on this mock-up may be a functional one.
Obviously it makes perfect sense for PLA to train extensively with a mock-up of Burke-class since that design is used by USN and JMSDF and to some degree Korea and Australia - so close to 100 ships that are either almost identical or share the core characteristic imitated by this mock-up.
Also if you want to train AI for
autonomous detection and identification of targets without giving the enemy information on your sensor paramters this is the best way to go. Once you have the baseline data for signatures in all possible conditions you can input them into a digital simulator and re-run them using a high-fidelity model.
The pennant is to be verified but this is one of the more intersting things I've seen on this forum. Where did you find this image??? If this is public source then it's not an accident that it's being released. ONI is likely all over it... or they better be.