It surfaced briefly in 2000 at a military exercise, but then resumed its fairly indolent career. The Xia-class boat was thought to have gone into refit in 1995, and was not seen for years. It has allegedly never sailed beyond Chinese waters. The sub undertook a single patrol and then never sailed again, staying pierside for so long there were rumors it had caught fire and sank in 1985. The ship is also allegedly the noisiest of all U.S., Russian and Chinese ballistic missile submarines underwater, making it easy to detect and track. The ship became operational in 1983, but faced enduring problems with reliability and radiation leakage from its onboard reactor. Ship construction was notoriously difficult and likely strained the limits of China’s submarine building abilities.
The single Xia-class submarine was not a military success. Indeed, a PLA boomer would have to be parked in the Baltic Sea to place Moscow at risk. The missile’s range was disappointing: fired from the Yellow Sea, it could barely hit the northern half of Japan, and while it could hit the Soviet city of Vladivostok, it could not range as far as the important military hub of Khabarovsk. The JL-1 was first test-fired from a modified Golf-class submarine in September 1982. The JL-1 was a solid fueled design with a range of just 1,770 kilometers and a 250-kiloton warhead. The Xia class was designed to carry twelve Julang (“Great Wave”) JL-1 ballistic missiles.