The ship was laid down as Riga on December 6, 1985, at Shipyard 444 in Mykolaiv, Ukrainian SSR, intended for the Soviet Navy as a Kuznetsov-class carrier. Launched on December 4, 1988, she was renamed Varyag in 1990 after a cruiser from the Russo-Japanese War. When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the hull was only 68 percent complete. Ukraine could neither finish nor afford the vessel. Stripped of engines, weapons, and electronics by various scavengers, the rusting hulk sat in the shipyard while its value plummeted. The 1998 auction brought the Chong Lot bid of $20 million, and the pretense of a casino conversion gave the deal just enough plausibility to proceed.

Getting Varyag from the Black Sea to China proved nearly as difficult as buying her. In June 2000, a tugboat took the powerless hull under tow. Turkey refused passage through the Bosphorus, citing the risk that wind could turn the massive hull sideways and block the entire strait. For sixteen months, Varyag circled the Black Sea, accumulating towing charges of $8,500 per day while Chong Lot stopped paying its bills. French daredevils landed a helicopter on the drifting deck. Turkey finally relented in August 2001, and on November 1, the Bosphorus was cleared of all traffic for the passage. Three days later, a force-10 gale near the Greek island of Skyros snapped the tow lines; one sailor died reattaching them. Because the Suez Canal forbids passage of unpowered ships, the hulk had to go the long way: through the Strait of Gibraltar, around the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean, and through the Straits of Malacca. The 15,200-nautical-mile journey ended on March 3, 2002, at the Dalian naval shipyard. Total cost, by one participant's estimate: at least $120 million.

The conversion workload equaled building ten new destroyers. Engineers at the 701st Institute redesigned the vessel from stripped hulk to operational warship, installing Type 346 AESA radar, Type 1130 close-in weapons systems, and HQ-10 missiles. Cruise missile launchers from the original Soviet design were never installed; instead, the space became a larger hangar bay. Contrary to early reports that all engines had been removed, the four original power plants were found intact, preserved in grease seals, and restored to working order by 2011. Sea trials began on August 10, 2011, and on September 25, 2012, the carrier was commissioned as Liaoning, named for the province where she was reborn. Her air wing would carry 24 Shenyang J-15 fighters, six anti-submarine helicopters, four airborne early warning helicopters, and two rescue helicopters.

Liaoning was initially classified as a training ship, a floating classroom where the PLAN could learn the complex choreography of carrier operations from scratch. Brazilian Navy aviators provided early carrier training support. The first successful arrested landings of J-15 fighters came on November 25, 2012. By 2016, her political commissar declared the ship combat-ready, and by 2019 she formally shifted to a combat role. Since then, Liaoning has exercised in the South China Sea, transited the Miyako Strait near Okinawa, and in June 2025 operated alongside a second Chinese carrier in the Philippine Sea, the first time two Chinese carriers had worked together beyond the first island chain. In December 2025, a confrontation near Okinawa saw J-15s lock fire-control radar onto Japanese F-15J fighters, an incident that drew sharp international criticism.

From the air above Dalian, the shipyard where Liaoning was rebuilt stretches along the coast of Liaoning Province, the same waters where the Beiyang Fleet once anchored. The ship's home port is now the Yuchi Naval Base near Huangdao in Shandong Province, but her transformation happened here, in the industrial harbor of a city that has passed from Russian to Japanese to Chinese hands over the course of a century. The ski-jump ramp at her bow, a Soviet design feature that limits the payload of launching aircraft, is a visible reminder that Liaoning is a transitional vessel, a stepping stone toward the larger, catapult-equipped carriers China has since built. She began as Cold War ambition, became post-Soviet scrap, and emerged as the foundation of a Pacific naval power's carrier doctrine.