The Wall Street Journal has a report detailing China’s advantages in shipbuilding and the scale of the country’s maritime-infrastructure operations. For those concerned about a CCP that is turning more bellicose by the year, the development of China as the world’s majority shipbuilder using foreign orders to build out its navy-support facilities is worrisome, to say the least.
Niharika Mandhana reports for the WSJ:
More than half of the world’s commercial shipbuilding output came from China last year—making it the top global shipmaker by a wide margin. The once-prolific shipyards of the West that helped forge empires, expand trade and win wars have shriveled. Europe accounts for just 5% of the world’s output, while the U.S. contributes next to nothing. Most of what China doesn’t build comes from South Korea and Japan.
“The scale [of China’s shipbuilding] is just almost hard to fathom,” said Thomas Shugart, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security whose research focuses on maritime competition. “The degree to which it dwarfs American shipbuilding is just unbelievable.”
This shipbuilding empire is a symbol of China’s historic transformation from an inward-looking continental nation to a maritime power. But it is more than that. It is a pivotal strategic asset for Beijing as Chinese leader Xi Jinping tries to reshape the world order in peacetime and prepares to prevail over his nation’s rivals during war.
Giant Chinese shipbuilding firms that crank out merchant ships for the world are often the same ones building warships for China’s navy. Their shipyards are thriving, with billion-dollar contracts pouring in not just for warfighting gray hulls but also for containerships, oil tankers and bulk carriers for shipping lines from China, the West and even Taiwan.
To come close to matching this buildup, Jerry Hendrix suggested recently in the pages of National Review that American conservatives and the federal government would have to get more comfortable with a nonmarket solution: monopsony.
Hendrix concluded:
There is no magic market force, no invisible hand from either Adam Smith or Dwight Eisenhower, that will reignite the defense-industrial base. To repeat, this sector of our economy is a monopsony in which the government is the only customer. Even those who are skeptical of industrial policy in general — most conservatives among them — should be able to recognize that defense manufacturing is different. We find ourselves today facing a significant probability of global military cataclysm, and we are not ready. We need a strong and unassailable military-industrial capacity to deter war; if deterrence fails, we will need that same capacity to avoid disaster and survive as a great power. We need ships. We need aircraft. We need missiles. But more fundamentally, we need to be able to build them in much larger numbers.