Why a blue-water navy requires experience as well as ships

How close is the People's Liberation Army Navy to becoming a true blue-water navy?

It is close and has the required components, but still needs greater quantity and more experience integrating and sustaining them.

The People's Liberation Army Navy possesses the necessary categories of capability and is approaching genuine blue-water capacity. A checklist of carriers, escorts, and support ships is insufficient by itself. The service also needs enough of every component to sustain deployments and replace unavailable units. Crews and commanders must accumulate experience integrating those components at distance. The PLAN is close, but it has not yet matched a mature fleet that has repeatedly operated the whole system in concert.