Red sea

On a spring morning sometime between the two world wars, mist rises over the Harland & Wolff shipyard in East Belfast. Cranes loom in the gray dawn. The work around them feels almost devotional. A new ship is taking shape, like a floating cathedral.

Skilled workers—welders, riveters, draftsmen, electricians—transform two-dimensional designs into complex hull curves, maneuver vast steel plates into position, and work in cramped quarters. For centuries, shipyards like Harland & Wolff marked a vessel’s completion with a ceremony. A child or dignitary would screw in the final, silver rivet.

That was then. Today, shipbuilding in the U.S. and Europe is disenchanted. The United States’ share of the global commercial shipbuilding market now stands at 0.1 percent. Europe’s is 7 percent. Between 2019 and 2021, the value of Europe’s orders dropped by 78 percent.

Meanwhile, China has taken control. More than 300 shipyards line the Chinese coast. The U.S. built five large merchant vessels in 2024; in China, a single company, the China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC), turned out more than 250 ships.

Beijing is leveraging this dominance, too. The same shipyards build both commercial and military vessels, so any country sending an order for a ship is also sending money and technology to the People’s Liberation Army.

How did this happen?

Brian Hart is the deputy director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and the co-author of the recent report Ship Wars: Confronting China’s Dual-Use Shipbuilding Empire. Hart says the transformation of the industry began two decades ago, when Beijing decided that it wanted to develop its domestic production capacity—and dedicated a lot of government funding to make it happen. And in the process, the state tore down the firewall that other countries long kept in place between the commercial and military production of ships—a move that’s saved money and brought cutting-edge know-how into China’s armed forces.

The fate of shipbuilding, Hart says, is the latest variation on a familiar theme: Over the past few decades, the U.S. and European economies shifted toward service industries while manufacturing moved abroad—and here, as in many cases, China wound up as the new dominant actor in a global market. Beijing’s leading position in the field carries important economic benefits, but leaders in the U.S., Europe, and Asia are worried about what it all means for national security. If there’s ever a war between China and the U.S. or the broader West, only one side has the capability to ramp up the production of fighting ships quickly and at scale …

Allison Braden: What happened to shipbuilding?