In the second of a two-part series by South China Morning Post, Xu Zengping, said the PLA Navy told him the service was severely underfunded and there was no support in Beijing when they asked him to go to Ukraine to buy Varyag.
He had to borrow money from a friend in Hong Kong and paid US$30 million for the ship along with 40 tonnes of blueprints for the carrier. He had them packed into eight trucks and moved overland to China.