What is the core of a country's enduring capability in war? Manufacturing, or industrial production capacity, is undoubtedly the standard answer. Recently, Wall Street published an article saying that China has risen to become a global power by building itself into the world's factory. Now, China is building another impressive industrial capability that will directly benefit China's military power, which is to become the world's shipyard.
In 2023, China's commercial shipbuilding capacity will exceed 50% of the world's total shipbuilding capacity, and China's shipbuilding industry is far ahead of any other country. Western countries also used to build ships on a large scale, especially when empires rose and the world flourished. But now, the Western shipbuilding industry has long been in decline, the commercial shipbuilding output of the whole of Europe is less than 5% of the global production capacity, and the United States, which still sits firmly on the world's first throne, has no achievements in the field of commercial shipbuilding. At present, the world's shipbuilding capacity, except for China, which accounts for the vast majority, mainly comes from the shipbuilding industry in South Korea and Japan.
"The size of China's shipbuilding industry is almost unfathomable, and the extent to which it dwarfs its American counterparts is simply unbelievable," said a senior U.S. researcher who studies maritime competition
China has built itself into a shipbuilding empire, marking a historic shift from a continental nation to a maritime power. The significance of this transformation is not only commercial, but also plays a crucial role in reshaping the future world order and defeating China's opponents in times of war. From this point of view, the shipbuilding industry has become an important strategic asset at the level of national competition.
Large shipbuilding enterprises in China, while producing container ships, cruise ships and bulk carriers for customers around the world. Often also in the construction of the Chinese Navy**. The shipbuilding industry is booming, and countless orders are pouring in like snowflakes.
In terms of future orders, Chinese companies have won almost 60% of the world's orders in this field, and as a result, these shipyards are undergoing large-scale expansion, while training a large number of shipbuilding industry workers and a larger shipbuilding industry chain system.
China's naval development planners have taken advantage of China's shipbuilding industry to build the world's largest navy in terms of quantity. China's navy will continue to grow in the future, which will be critical for China to achieve greater maritime goals, project more power overseas, and protect China's overseas assets and sea lanes.
Compared with the booming shipbuilding industry in China, the once-thriving shipbuilding industry in the United States has long since shrunk to the point where it is not in shape, and the commercial shipbuilding industry is no longer able to produce a significant number of ships. And the only major customer of the existing shipyards in the United States is the US Navy. Because the number of orders is too small, American shipbuilders have been facing problems such as a backlog of raw materials and a shortage of skilled workers.
Because the orders of the U.S. shipbuilding industry continue to shrink, the shipbuilding industry chain is also shrinking, and the number of companies that provide support for U.S. shipbuilding is continuing to decrease, such as the company that has built the first superstructure composite materials for the Zumwalt-class destroyer because the number of orders is too small, which has led to the United States to build new ships must give up the application of related materials, or purchase these materials from Japan, South Korea, and Chinese counterparts, which has led to the problem of serious cost overruns in the U.S. shipbuilding industry. Behind the chaotic phenomenon of cost management of US ships, it is actually caused by the decline of the entire US shipbuilding industry chain.
Regarding the soaring cost of construction, Anderson, a rear admiral of the U.S. Navy and an executive officer of the U.S. Navy program, said at a U.S. congressional panel meeting last May: The reason why China can produce at a low cost is mainly due to the huge commercial shipbuilding industry chain. And the United States ** must alone bear all the costs of ships and infrastructure. The meaning of this passage is very clear, the Chinese Navy only needs to bear the cost of ship procurement when purchasing ships, and the procurement of US first-class ships must also support the entire shipbuilding industry chain at the same time. Based on the huge capacity of commercial shipbuilding, China has a huge advantage over the United States in terms of cost.
If a protracted war breaks out between China and the United States one day in the future, China's shipbuilding industry will give the Chinese navy a clear advantage. The scale advantage of Chinese shipyards allows for rapid production for the army in wartime, replacing war-damaged ships, and repairing more war-damaged ships. Just as the United States in World War II only took three days to repair a badly damaged aircraft carrier. During World War II, the United States also had China's current shipbuilding capabilities, and while meeting the needs of the U.S. Navy, it also quickly produced a sufficient number of ships for the Allied countries, far faster than the German and Japanese navies sank Allied ships.
And today's American shipbuilding industry is difficult to meet even peacetime needs. Repairs to submarines often had to be parked in port because of delays. The Seawolf-class nuclear submarine, which was seriously damaged in the South China Sea a few years ago, has not returned from injury to this day, which is the best illustration. There are serious delays in the repair of submarines, and the progress of new submarines is significantly behind the plans of the US Navy. The U.S. Department of Defense** said that the U.S. Navy budget department can complete the allocation for two new Virginia-class submarines each year, but the Navy can only receive 14 ships, 30% behind expectations.
This is mainly due to the serious shortage of skilled workers in shipyards, and the fact that American universities no longer offer related majors, has also had a negative impact on the continuous decline in talent. In addition, the U.S. shipbuilding industry also has the dilemma of insufficient number of dry docks and too few suppliers of key equipment. All these have seriously affected the overall shipbuilding speed of the shipbuilding industry.
In response to this situation, elites in the United States say that it is a worrying situation. The recent large-scale Russia-Ukraine war, once it happens to the United States, the United States will have to face the current dilemma. The reason is that at the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war, many people would have thought that this war would end soon. In reality, however, the war eventually turned into a protracted war of attrition. And a war of attrition needs the support of the country's industrial base.
Even if the first factories in the United States are fully supporting Ukraine, the production rate of ** ammunition in the United States has not been able to keep up with the consumption rate on the battlefield in Ukraine. Relative to an adversary like China, Ukraine's needs are nothing more than pediatrics. Based on this, American strategists said that both the production capacity of ammunition and the shipbuilding capacity of the shipbuilding industry in the United States indicate that the United States is not ready for war with China.
On the Taiwan issue, American experts said that if the United States needs to intervene in a military conflict in southeast China. China's mission is to send as many ships as possible to arrive and unload enough soldiers and equipment, while the United States is tasked with stopping China's behavior. This also determines that the two sides must destroy as many of each other's missiles as possible in order to achieve the purpose of blocking these missiles launched.
Under this demand, as two major countries with comparable military science and technology, the competition between the two sides is no longer the technical performance of the best equipment, but the ability of both sides to replenish the battle-damaged ships more quickly, repair the damaged ships, and put them back into battle. The current predicament of the shipbuilding industry in the United States, even in wartime, cannot greatly increase shipbuilding capacity and provide adequate maintenance services. In particular, the insufficient number of skilled workers in modern shipbuilding severely limited the expansion of the wartime American shipbuilding industry.
U.S. experts say that compared with the United States' difficulty in dealing with the problem of replacing war damage and repairing damaged damage, China has no such concerns at all. Only China's shipbuilding capacity in the vicinity of Shanghai and the estuary of the Yangtze River has concentrated a large amount of shipbuilding capacity. The sum of the strength of the entire Western shipbuilding industry is not as good as the production capacity of China alone.
In a report last May, the Center for Strategic and International Studies described Changxing Island as being built into a huge shipbuilding base, and since 2005, the Jiangnan shipyard has been moved from downtown Shanghai to Changxing Island, and the Hudong-Zhonghua shipyard has subsequently moved there.
And these shipyards, which are considered supergiants in the United States, are just a subsidiary of the much larger giant of China State Shipbuilding Corporation. China Shipbuilding Industry Group is a real super shipbuilding enterprise, and its customers include global shipping companies. Every year, international buyers buy ships from CSSC worth tens of billions of dollars, and this uninterrupted order determines CSSC's position in the world shipbuilding industry.
In May last year, American satellite imagery took high-definition footage of the Jiangnan shipyard. As you can see from the **, the number of ships under construction in the dock of the busy Jiangnan Shipyard is more than 20. This amount alone is more than the shipbuilding capacity of the entire United States. In addition to commercial vessels, the 20 ships also include the 055 destroyer and the 003 aircraft carrier, the core ships of the Chinese Navy.
According to a research report by a research institute in the United States that focuses on the development of China's shipbuilding industry, in the past, there was a certain degree of boundary between civilian and military ships. It is difficult for enterprises that build civilian ships to transform into military ships. At present, the boundaries between civilian and military ships are being broken by more and more advanced shipbuilding technology. This means that China's annual shipbuilding capacity of tens of millions of tons can theoretically be converted into the navy's shipbuilding capacity. That is to say, at present, China only needs to convert one-third of its shipbuilding capacity into shipbuilding capacity, and theoretically China only needs one year to build the most powerful naval force in history.
For Jiangnan Shipyard, foreign experts said that when foreign companies buy ships from Jiangnan Shipyard and pay for the goods, part of the profits are used for the shipyard's investment. Jiangnan Shipyard is a giant that can produce military ships, which means that the infrastructure used by the Chinese Navy to grow up has basically come from contributions from all over the world.
In response to this situation, a researcher from the American Center said: All countries that buy ships from China are paying China, and China can use these resources to build or repair ships needed by the fleet in wartime, which is the most unacceptable.
In terms of existing naval data, at present, the Chinese Navy has a total of 370 warships, surpassing the US Navy. It is estimated that by 2030, this number will increase to 435, an average increase of about 10 per year, and China's cutting-edge warships are becoming more and more advanced, such as the 0.55 million ton drive of the first ship of the Blue Star with equipment level. By around 2030, the growth of the Chinese Navy will be compounded by the decline of the U.S. Navy, at which point the Chinese Navy will catch up with the United States in gross tonnage. At the same time, the warships of the Chinese Navy are more cutting-edge, and compared with the old-fashioned ** of the United States, their technical performance and combat capabilities are more powerful.
Compared with the rapid growth of the Chinese Navy, the total size of the US Navy will usher in a period of decline in strength in the future because the number of retired warships exceeds that of the warships in service. If there is no large-scale war during the period of decline of the US Navy, the United States will only usher in the growth of the Navy again when it has passed this period.
For U.S. researchers, the U.S. Navy's superiority over the Chinese Navy is not without consolation. Like better fleet platforms, such as aircraft carriers. But because the gap in the number of ships is getting wider and wider by China. There are also more naval strategists who say that sometimes numerical superiority is also important relative to platforms and tonnage. Therefore, the size of the fleet cannot always be pursued high, and the scale advantage cannot be ignored.
In October 2023, the U.S. Secretary of the Navy attended a shipyard in San Francisco, which was once one of the busiest shipyards in the United States during World War II and was as prosperous as Changxing Island in Shanghai, China, today, and a symbol of the strength of the U.S. Navy. The shipyard was closed in the nineties of the last century after the construction of 17 nuclear submarines after World War II.
The U.S. Secretary of the Navy said that history has proved a clear law, no naval power is not a dominant commercial maritime power in the same period, including in the shipbuilding industry and the global shipping industry.
Obviously, the United States, both shipbuilding and shipping, has been left far behind by China. We often see an argument on the Internet that if the United States had not been supported by financial hegemony, the entire global hegemony would have collapsed long ago. However, financial hegemony can always only be a tool for making profits in peacetime, and no amount of money in wartime can be exchanged for industrial advantage. Britain once fell from the altar due to industrial decline, and the United States is bound to repeat the mistakes of the past. This is a historical necessity.
At the end of this article, I would like to say a little bit about what I think about Wall Street's statement that the United States is not ready for war. Wars, especially naval battles, place high demands on a country's basic industrial capacity. It is not that the United States is not unprepared for war at the moment. Instead, through the relocation of the industrial chain, the financial hegemony of the United States was exchanged. And the price of this hegemony is the emasculation of one's own war potential. From this point of view, no matter how hard the United States tries, as long as it does not give up its financial hegemony, the industrial strength of the United States will be unable to extricate itself from the continuous decline!