Chinese Shipbuilding Success Shows the Realist Roots of Power

As China grows economically, it remains restrained. The U.S. does the opposite. Which is the winning formula?

A recently released report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies examines the People’s Republic of China’s undeniable success in dominating the global shipbuilding industry. China represents over half of Earth’s industrial capacity in this field, with South Korea and Japan coming in a very distant second and third place respectively. The United States, meanwhile, is .1% of global shipbuilding. The largest Chinese manufacturer in this field produced more shipping in the year of 2024 than the entirety of U.S. ship manufacturing did in the post-World War II Era.

This rise to global power is extremely impressive for Beijing but is also due to many foolish mistakes in the past four decades on behalf of the United States. The neoliberal economic experiment, which the Bipartisan establishment bet so much on in the latter-stage phase of the Cold War and beyond, has not only failed to produce dividends, but hollowed out the industrial capacity of many industries that once were the bedrock of American power. By chasing cheap consumer products through offshoring to the ‘global south’, to reorienting economic policy around speculative finance rather than production of goods, the nation and many of its allies not only damaged social cohesion and job security at home, but undermined its own national security in the long run.

It was theorized in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s that freedom of trade would obviate many of these concerns. As more of the world outside of the North Atlantic and other developed countries were brought into a globalized market it was thought that they would inevitably come to not only economically model themselves after neoliberal capital but also politically become more like the liberal democracies that served as its primary proponents. This in turn was theorized to reduce warfare and state-state competition, though there was never any evidence that this would be so. What happened instead was that countries such as China wisely took advantage of these global institutions to grow their markets and trade with other nations without opening themselves up, largely retaining public-private partnerships in order to get the best of both worlds.

This was fully in their national interest, and they have benefited immensely from this policy. The question is now, why did the U.S. see the experiment of using its hard power to benefit this system while actively losing out to strategic competitors as a success for so long?

The answer is to be found in a type of victory disease that took root after the end of the Cold War. If history could “end” with the inevitable triumph of liberal democracy, then there was no need for self-improvement. It was simply a matter of time for the United States to wait around and have the nations of the world cluster under the shadow of its wings. Having ceased to become a distinct republic, the United States simultaneously deindustrialized and spent trillions of dollars on quests to remake the world through endless and almost uniformly ruinous military interventions abroad. Wars that often produced outcomes the opposite of what was desired or humanitarian catastrophe and only furthered the relative strength of rival nations who wisely refrained from such adventures.

China, meanwhile, has not fought a war since 1979. The time of its most massive growth is congruent with relative peace in its foreign affairs. In this way, China is behaving like the United States did before the Spanish-American War. Husbanding resources for domestic development, avoiding entangling alliances of values-based crusades, the China of today is the embodiment of the Taoist injunction to follow wu wei, or effortless action. As they grow economically, they remain comparatively restrained militarily. The U.S. meanwhile does the opposite. Which approach works better for meeting 21st Century challenges should be apparent to all.

Power ultimately has a material basis in logistics, and a strategic basis on how those logistics are utilized. The Chinese have a civilization that dates back thousands of years. Governments have risen and fallen countless times. They are the descendants of both eras of many different Chinese states and numerous unified dynasties that monopolized the region. They have experienced foreign occupations from steppe nomads as well as the maritime powers of the 19th and 20th Centuries. As the Second Century political theorist Han Fei once said, “No country is permanently strong, nor is any country permanently weak”. Implicit in this view is the understanding that history lacks an inevitable linear path. Prepared to face an uncertain future, Beijing can draw upon a vast past of examples that complicate any attempt to make an overly simple narrative.

Knowing all of this, the Chinese were both unwilling and unable to forget that power ultimately has far more basic roots than grand ideals of world transformation. The contemporary popular American view of history as a redemptive arc, something to simply be overcome in the making of its own end, is flatly wrong. Nor is it even compatible with the classically-influenced world view of many of the Founding Fathers. The older and civilizational-scale states of the world, of which China is one, see history instead as a plethora of examples to learn in order to better master chaos and adapt to changing policies. This process can never end so long as humanity exists, and therefore the central question of grand strategy cannot move away from the wise allocation of resources. It was this long-term perspective that kept China immune from the temptations of the neoliberal experiment, yet nimble enough to benefit from other countries adopting those policies.

It is undeniable that the U.S. must re-industrialize many critical industries and correct for its past hubris by re-learning the centrality of logistics, especially as it relates to shipping. Considering the importance of the challenge, it most likely will. But going forward it is imperative that future policymakers in the Beltway not forget that the true basis of power, lest this problem repeat itself in a new outbreak of ahistorical idealism.

Christopher Mott is a Washington Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy and author of 'The Formless Empire: A Short History of Diplomacy and Warfare in Central Asia.' He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of St Andrews and previously worked at the think tank Defense Priorities and the U.S. Department of State. His primary interests are historical geopolitics and the emerging polycentric world order.