China continues to pursue the notion of building its own aircraft carriers and could have any number of them over the next decade or so, but it remains unclear just how many Beijing wants, a senior U.S. defense official said Thursday. The official, discussing the Pentagon’s annual report to Congress on China’s military buildup, said even as China experiments on an aircraft carrier it purchased 16 years ago, it is clearly moving toward producing its own, possibly by the 2020s.…
