Washington (AP) – In just two decades, China has grown the dominant player in shipbuilding and has claimed more than half of the globally commercial ship tree market, while the US share has dropped to only 0.1%, which, according to a report, was published on Tuesday by the Center for Strategy and International Studies and International Studies, for the USA and its allies.
In 2024 alone, a Chinese shipbuard built more merchant ships with tonnage than the entire US shipbuilding industry has built since the end of World War II. China already has the world’s largest naval fleet, said the cross-party thinking factory based in Washington in his 75-page report.
“The erosion of the US and Allied shipbuilding skills is an urgent threat to the military willingness, reduces economic opportunities and contributes to the global ambitions of China’s power projection,” says the report.
The concerns regarding the impoverished state of the US shipbuild have increased in recent years because the country standing from China, which has the second largest economy in the world and has ambitions to re -change the world order. At a hearing in the congress in December, high -ranking civil servants and legislators urged measures.
Last week President Donald Trump told Congress that his Republican administration “revive” the American shipbuilding industry for commercial and military ships and “would create a recent office of shipbuilding in the White House.
“We used to do so many ships,” said Trump. “We don’t make them very much, but we will make them very quickly very quickly. It will have a massive influence. “
In February, the heads of four huge unions called for Trump to boost American shipbuilding and enforce tariffs and other “strong punishments” against China for its increasing dominance in this sector.
“What we see now is a recognition of the strategic importance of shipbuilding and port security as well as the associated challenges of China,” said Matthew Funaole, a high-ranking scholarship holder of the China Power Project at CSIS and co-author of the report. According to Funaole, concerns about the shipbuilding building are “a rather cross -party problem”.
The report states that China’s shipbuilding sector has undergone a “striking metamorphosis” in the past two decades and, from a “peripheral player”, turned into a dominant player on the global market.
At the same time, China has greatly expanded its marine. Last year, a CSIS evaluation showed that China had operated 234 warships compared to the 219 of the US Navy, although the United States continued to have an advantage for guided missile crossers and destroyers.
When developing recommendations for the United States to compete with China, the researchers zoomed in the utilize of the “Military Civil Fusion” strategy by Beijing by the Chinese company, which blurred the boundaries between the country’s defense and trading sectors.
They found that CSSC, which builds both commercial and military ships, sells three quarters of its commercial production to buyers outside of China, including the US Allied Denmark, France, Greece, Japan and South Korea. These foreign companies therefore transfer billions of dollars to Chinese shipyards that also produce warships, promote China’s modernization of their navy and provide Chinese defense companies with two utilize, according to the report.
The CSIS researchers suggested that the United States should invest in the reconstruction of its shipbuilding industry as a long-term solution and work with allies to expand shipbuilding capacities outside of China. Finally, they recommended measures to participate in competitive conditions and to disturb “China’s dark dual-use ecosystem”, e.g.
The Trump administration has proposed recent fees for ships connected to China, in which US ports are called. A consortium led by Blackrock last week has agreed to acquire 43 ports worldwide, including the two ports on both sides of the Panama Canal, from a Hong Kong -based conglomerate.
