This is not breaking news, but an interesting item in the Wall Street Journal highlighting that despite all of China's economic woes it remains a massive global industrial power.
- 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 Journal piece (gated) goes on:
- China’s military planners have leveraged all that to build up the world’s largest navy, in hull count—a force central to Xi’s greatest ambitions of projecting power overseas, protecting the sea lanes that connect China to the world and absorbing Taiwan.
- America’s once-robust shipbuilding industry has shrunk. It no longer produces any significant number of commercial oceangoing ships. Several shipyards have only one big customer, the Navy, and those shipyards are often battling backlogs, worker shortages, a paucity of suppliers and cost overruns.
Well worth a read if you can access the WSJ.
