The People’s Liberation Army Navy marked the first anniversary of the commissioning of its lead 054B frigate, Luohe (hull 545), on 22 January, underscoring a deliberate push to modernize and scale up the navy’s surface-warfare and escort capabilities. Built domestically, the 5,000-ton vessel represents a clear technical and doctrinal evolution from the previous 054A class and signals Beijing’s intent to field more capable, cost-effective escorts for longer-range operations.
Over the past year the Luohe has moved quickly from sea-trials into tougher, more realistic drills: multi-domain, day-and-night attack-and-defend exercises, live-fire main-gun and close-in weapon system shoots, underway replenishment and anti-submarine operations. The program emphasises three explicit upgrades—reduced radar cross-section and other stealth features, improved reconnaissance and early-warning sensors as a result of higher-volume radar suites, and denser weapons fit including additional missiles—that together boost the ship’s autonomous and fleet-level combat effectiveness.
Military commentator Zhang Junshe frames the 054B as narrowing the gap between China’s traditional frigates and larger destroyers. While destroyers remain the fleet’s long-range, multi-mission workhorses, the new 054B’s displacement and systems push it into missions once reserved for bigger hulls: extended blue-water escort, layered air defence and more capable anti-submarine warfare. Compared with Western European frigates from France and Italy, the 054B is broadly comparable in tonnage, and China’s designers appear to have concentrated advantages in weapon density and engagement coverage.
The ship’s emergence should be read in the context of a broader PLAN force mix: continued construction of very large destroyers and carriers, massing of 052D-class hulls as the backbone destroyer, and now a more numerous, improved frigate class to fill mid-tier tasks. Frigates are cheaper to build and operate than large surface combatants, making them ideal for high-volume tasks—escort, patrol, anti-submarine screens and presence missions—across the Indian Ocean, South China Sea and beyond. The 054A’s previous deployments to the Gulf of Aden at ranges of some 4,400 nautical miles illustrated that China’s frigate force can already sustain long deployments when needed.
Strategically, the 054B’s features matter because they are tailored to Beijing’s current maritime priorities: protecting sea lines of communication, sustaining energy imports, and safeguarding overseas interests without always deploying scarce capital ships. A more capable frigate fleet raises the baseline capacity of the PLAN to project and sustain operations at range, complicating calculations for regional navies and for distant powers that monitor or contest Chinese maritime activity. The decisive variables will be production rate, integration into carrier and task-group operations, and logistical support for sustained deployments.
The Luohe’s first year does not by itself transform regional balances, but it is a tangible sign of iterative improvement: reduced detectability, better situational awareness and greater firepower packed into a hull that can be produced at scale. Observers should watch how many 054Bs enter service, how they are used in mixed task forces, and whether the class catalyses a shift toward relying on larger numbers of medium-sized yet capable escorts rather than only very large, expensive surface combatants.