Beijing announced its step quietly with one sentence buried at the end of a lengthy government publication.
“In 2009, China put forward a plan and a programme for building an aircraft carrier,” says China’s Ocean Development Report (2010), a book published in May by the State Oceanic Administration, a body under the Ministry of Land and Resources.
“This shows that China has started entering a new historic era of comprehensively building itself into a great naval power. [This] is China’s historic task for the entire 21st century,” the report said.
http://defense-technologynews.blogspot.com/2010/12/dtn-news-defense-news-china-reveals.html