A sail-less Chinese submarine appears in Shanghai, longer than a US Virginia-class boat

Satellite imagery has caught a previously unreported Chinese submarine with no conning tower, the newest entry in a build rate Western navies cannot match.

A previously unreported Chinese submarine with no traditional sail has appeared at the Jiangnan shipyard in Shanghai, captured in commercial satellite imagery dated May 31 and June 1, Naval News and The War Zone wrote. Beijing has not announced the launch, and state media has said nothing, Naval News noted.

H.I. Sutton, the undersea-warfare analyst who first reported the boat for Naval News, estimated it at roughly 120 meters long and 10 to 11 meters wide, longer than China's Type 093 attack submarines at about 108 to 110 meters and longer than the US Navy's 114.8-meter Virginia class, The War Zone noted. Its visible features are a streamlined bow and an X-form stern rudder, with the hull sitting very low in the water and no conning tower above it, per Naval News. The War Zone said a shrouded pumpjet may drive it.

Dropping the sail cuts drag, which can make a submarine faster and quieter while submerged, The War Zone detailed. The trade is that a sail normally carries periscopes, masts, and antennas, so its absence points to a hull tuned for speed or deep operations over surface work. Propulsion and mission are still unknown. Given the hull size, Naval News assessed nuclear power as the most likely option, and it judged a ballistic-missile role unlikely because a boat built to carry the JL-3 missile would be larger. The same yard launched a smaller sail-less testbed, about 45 meters long, back in 2018.

The boat lands inside a production run no other navy is matching. China has launched roughly 15 to 20 submarines in the past five years, including at least eight new classes, while Western yards struggle to build one or two at once, Naval News found. Rear Adm. Mike Brookes, head of the Office of Naval Intelligence, told the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission in March that the PLAN is shifting from diesel-electric to all-nuclear construction, The War Zone noted. China passed Russia as the world's second-largest operator of nuclear submarines this year, Militarnyi said.

Naval News said a second, similar boat may have launched around the same time at the Huludao yard on the Bohai Sea, which builds only nuclear submarines. Two hulls of one new class from two yards, if confirmed, would reopen the question of which boat is China's next-generation Type 095, Naval News said.