Economy
Why the US Can Never Match Chinese Shipbuilding
America’s $66 billion plan to “beat China’s shipbuilding empire” is not a strategy but an admission of systemic deadlock: unable to compete directly, the US is turning to asymmetric sabotage.
In the video, an American shipyard worker is seen wearing a helmet with a sticker saying, “Go Navy, Beat China,” China — a nation that has never attacked the United States — and instead has been subject to US encroachment, occupation, and war both before and after the World Wars — exemplifying the delusional belligerence US interests encourage among the American public and specifically those among the US military and across its military industrial base.
Detached even further from reality is the notion of the US “beating China” in the realm of shipbuilding where China is reported to build between 1,000 to 1,700 ships a year while the US builds ships in single digit numbers.
While the video discusses plans by the US to invest in shipbuilding through expanding the workforce with training programs, improve worker retention, and through the use of new technology to produce more with less, and even plans to have US proxies build ships for the US — no plans were announced to address the systemic problems creating this disparity in shipbuilding capacity in the first place.
The problems stymying US shipbuilding (and all other productive industries in the US) are problems no amount of investment or technology can solve until the root causes themselves are addressed.
US-China Shipbuilding Gap is a Symptom of Bigger Problems
The atrophy of US shipbuilding has not taken place in a vacuum or overnight.
It has been in decline alongside all other major productive American industries and for generally the same reasons. The US has spent decades prioritizing shareholder primacy (the pursuit of perpetually expanding profits) at the expense of all other considerations — including industrial capacity, national infrastructure, American education, and the workforce the US educational system is tasked with creating.
The US — in pursuit of perpetual profits — has reorganized its economy from a global industrial leader, to a financialized Ponzi-economy building wealth across ledgers rather than upon factory floors.
The US educational system reflects this reprioritization — not only in redirecting students from productive vocations to better serve the Ponzi-economy — but also in the form of maximizing profits to access the education system itself. This has been done through expanding privatization across primary and secondary education, and across all forms of higher education. Young adults find themselves faced with tens of thousands of US dollars in debt before starting their first step in any chosen career.
This has created not only a critical shortage of workers for the US industrial base, it has created a systemic obstacle that must be removed before that critical shortage of workers can even be addressed. Reforming US education alone, is a process that could take a generation to solve.
An atrophied workforce is only one of several systemic problems the US faces. The other takes the shape of national infrastructure, including transportation, energy production and distribution, and the very facilities at which shipbuilding and other forms of industrial activity take place.
Because the US functions as a for-profit system where the “private sector” is responsible for all of the above — and because profits are always easier to make through financialization and/or legacy industrial processes (making money by doing or selling the same thing over and over again) — the chances of the “private sector” investing in the infrastructure and facilities required to even expand US shipbuilding significantly, let alone meaningfully close the gap with China, are next to non-existent.
Shortcuts have been proposed, including private and government-funded training programs to rapidly expand the pool of qualified workers for jobs across the US military industrial complex, and specifically in the realm of shipbuilding.
But even with the proposed training programs to expand the US workforce — another systemic problem exists preventing the efficient use of this workforce. The cost of training and retaining American workers will always be astronomically more expensive than in China precisely because of the for-profit financialized nature of the US Ponzi-economy in all aspects beyond (including directly upstream from) shipbuilding.
In the United States, any particular American labourer requires a wage capable of paying for the exorbitant cost-of-living in the US, including not only their own education/training, but also their rent, food, utilities, transportation, and healthcare. Even with healthcare provided by the shipbuilding industry — the corporations themselves must pay astronomically higher costs for that healthcare than in China.
This is because — in addition to the shipbuilding sector itself attempting to maximize profit in exchange for minimal effort or purpose — the US workforce is preyed upon by similar profit-maximization across all other sectors of US economic activity. The pharmaceutical industry alone uses US tax-funded research and development to produce medication — then charges many times its production costs for access to it.
China’s government does vastly better in subordinating pharmaceutical production to national interests — rather than the other way around as it functions in the US. This means that regardless of whether a company, an insurance policy, or an individual patient in China is paying the costs for healthcare, it will always be cheaper overall than in the United States.
This example applied across other costs of living — whether it is food, electricity, Internet access, or rent — plays out in a similar way. Chinese workers consistently enjoy cheaper prices, accessible services, and better infrastructure because the Chinese government places the purpose of production and the livelihood of those involved above the maximization of profits. This means China’s private sector, state-owned enterprises, and combinations of the two are free to pursue profit maximization as long as it doesn’t undermine collective national interests including the welfare of the Chinese population.
The US system, when compared to China’s, could be best equated to a troop of chimpanzees stripping bare fruit trees across the forest they live in (and taking that of other nearby troops) versus farmland carefully and sustainably cultivated by a family of farmers. Both approaches ultimately satisfy hunger. Only one approach does so reliably and sustainably by emphasizing long-term planning over short-sighted and immediate satisfaction.
Beyond a more humane economic and political system, China’s is also a more efficient system. The maximization of profits not only comes at the cost of the vast majority of any population within a system doing so — it also comes at the cost of any other objective besides maximizing profits — including the quality of and accessibility to services, and the quality and quantities of manufactured goods — in this case — ships.
The Chinese government’s overall approach to economics and governance ensures sound fundamentals in terms of infrastructure and workforce, but also ensures that the shipbuilding process in China itself serves the purpose of actually making ships to serve specific national priorities — both in the realm of commercial commerce and national defense — in addition to simply making money (which they also do).
In order for the United States to even meaningfully close the gap with China — it would need to address all of these systemic problems plaguing its shipbuilding industry and all the upstream economic activity that makes shipbuilding possible — including cost of living for workers, supply chains, and the infrastructure facilitating both.
If the US Cannot Compete, it Will Try to Delete
Even if the US were to shift over to an entirely purpose-driven socioeconomic model — it would still fall far short of matching Chinese shipbuilding solely because of the disparity in scale between the US and China. China’s population is vastly larger, as is its overall industrial base, education system, and its national infrastructure.
Because of the US’ inability to outcompete directly with China and other productive nations around the globe — it will increasingly seek the use of asymmetric methods of undermining and disrupting productive forces.
This includes the US’ current regional war in West Asia — targeting Iran and its allies — Hezbollah in Lebanon and Ansarallah in Yemen, but also the targeting of supposed US “allies” like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Kuwait whose energy production and exports have been likewise targeted and disrupted amid the ongoing US aggression.
The disruption of energy exports from West Asia to the rest of Asia — including China — is meant to undermine and roll back Chinese industrial production and economic prosperity as a substitute for the US’ inability to compete with China directly.
The US has recently begun striking at data centers across Russia — the opening shots in a planned global asymmetric strategy to stop multipolar artificial intelligence development from permanently surpassing the US in the same manner production, military, and other technological capabilities have begun to do.
The US is also increasingly threatening waterways worldwide — both directly and by proxy — through a combination of outright wars and associated blockades, the seizure of ships “sanctioned” by the US and its European proxies, and the use of maritime drones (attributed to US proxies like Ukraine) to physically strike at and attempt to destroy the shipping of targeted nations. While it is primarily Russian shipping being targeted now — Chinese shipping has been affected with the likelihood of wider and more deliberate targeting expanding in the near future.
Together with the US effectively banning Chinese-built ships from US ports through targeted fees and the likelihood the US will force its proxies worldwide to follow suit — the US is attempting to target Chinese industry, including shipbuilding, from a multitude of economic, political, administrative, and military vectors.
Beyond these methods — the US continues political interference worldwide, in attempt to both disrupt global peace and stability and thus economic progress among the multipolar world, but also to politically capture targeted nations and transform them into proxies the US can use as armed and dangerous geopolitical “battering rams” against nations like China as the US has done with Ukraine and Georgia (from 2003-2008) vis-à-vis Russia, and the Philippines and the island province of Taiwan the US is using against the rest of China.
The combination of these approaches constitutes a multidomain war on multipolarism — which is both an admission of the failure of US power and primacy, but still an existential threat to global peace, stability, prosperity, and human progress.
In the realm of shipbuilding in particular, the US seeks to use the industrial capacity of nations like South Korea and Japan to compensate for its own failing industrial base, attempting to both boost America’s ability to put to sea additional warships, but also maintain and repair those already at sea. Unfortunately, for the US — the combined shipbuilding capacity of itself and its proxies fails to amount to even half of China’s shipbuilding capacity alone.
The notion the US will leverage “new technologies” to more efficiently build, maintain, and repair ships fails to acknowledge the fact that China will just as easily use these “new technologies” to further enhance its current advantages over the US.
The only real means by which the US could close the gap in terms of shipbuilding vis-à-vis China would be to cripple or undermine China’s industrial base, and by doing so, its shipbuilding capacity — precisely through targeting the energy empowering China’s industry as well as the economic prosperity underpinning China’s national policies including continued improvement of and investment in its industrial base (including shipyards).
In other words, if the US cannot outcompete China, nor attack China’s industrial base directly, it seeks to asymmetrically target the global factors China’s growing economic might be being built on — energy and trade — both of which require peace and stability to thrive.
Only through asymmetrically sabotaging China’s ability to outproduce the US can the US ever hope to narrow the gap in shipbuilding or any other of a vast and growing number of metrics in which China matches or has far surpassed the US in.
The fear in Washington continues to be that even if the collective remaining power of the US is fully and radically leveraged toward this asymmetrical aggression — it might not only not be enough — it could supercharge China’s efforts to both overcome this asymmetrical aggression — and also collectively unite an increasingly multipolar world in purpose against the US’ pursuit of unwarranted global power.
Shipbuilding is only one of several metrics in which China has seemingly irreversibly surpassed the US. The fact the US continues seeking the means to reassert its primacy worldwide, especially against China, is not evidence necessarily that the US can succeed — but that through its efforts to attempt to do so — the US continues to pose the greatest danger to peace, stability, prosperity, and human progress on Earth today.
Not only does China and other productive forces on Earth today need to prevent the US from successfully reasserting unipolar primacy over the planet, it must also successfully prevent the US from destroying the planet in a failed effort to do so.
Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.
