Chinese Ships Are Carrying America’s Cargo. The U.S. Wants to Reverse That.
Beijing’s support helps its shipbuilding industry capture more than half the global market
SINGAPORE—In 2002, with China’s shipyards producing just 8% of global commercial tonnage, then-Premier Zhu Rongji challenged his nation. “China,” he said, “can hope to become the world’s No. 1 shipbuilding superpower.”
He was right.
Last year, Chinese shipyards delivered 53% of global tonnage, according to Clarksons Research. With so many goods in the U.S. imported from overseas, that means Chinese-made ships are essential to keeping American store shelves well-stocked.
As it did in building its high-speed rail network and Olympic venues, Beijing flexed its top-down power to make a national priority happen. It set concrete targets, cleared red tape and poured, by one estimate, more than $90 billion in subsidies into Chinese shipbuilders.
China’s dominance has spurred President Trump and a bipartisan group of lawmakers to form a plan that would make America a shipbuilding power again.
Step one in the plan: hurt China.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative last month proposed a fee of up to $1.5 million for Chinese-built ships docking in the U.S., an idea the Trump administration is preparing to implement quickly.
The World War II commercial fleet that supplied American forces in the Pacific with reinforcements, weaponry and food is a distant memory. U.S.-built ships accounted for 0.1% of global commercial tonnage last year, Clarksons said. China now possesses 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the U.S., according to the U.S. Navy.
The edge could be decisive if U.S.-China tensions in the Pacific turn into a prolonged armed conflict, said Seth Jones, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank. He cited an old battlefield adage: Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.
“If you look historically at militaries in warfare, they need ships to provide sustained logistics in a conflict,” Jones said. “You wouldn’t just do that with military ships. They would need big, commercial ships.”
The goal of the U.S. fees on Chinese-made ships is to push shipping giants such as Switzerland’s Mediterranean Shipping Company and Denmark’s A.P. Moller-Maersk to buy their ships elsewhere. Analysts at CSIS, the think tank, estimated that MSC and Maersk would respectively pay $2 billion and $1.2 billion annually if the port fees went into effect.
MSC’s chief executive has said that such fees would raise prices for consumers.
Port fees wouldn’t immediately help the American shipbuilding industry because there essentially isn’t one. In the short term, the beneficiaries would be shipyards in two U.S.-allied countries in Asia, South Korea and Japan.
Trump said in his address to Congress this month that he would offer tax incentives to revitalize American shipbuilding.
“We used to make so many ships,” he said. “We don’t make them anymore very much, but we’re going to make them very fast, very soon.”
The lesson from China—and before it, South Korea and Japan—is that making a lot of ships requires a lot of government support.
China’s plan kicked into action not long after Zhu, the Chinese premier, spelled out his goal. The central government set concrete targets, according to a research paper led by Panle Jia Barwick, a University of Wisconsin economist. It wanted annual shipbuilding production to reach 15 million deadweight tons by 2010 and 22 million deadweight tons by 2015.
Both goals were met.
Chinese national and local governments incentivized companies to build shipyards by offering land along the coast at below-market rates, providing favorable loans and tax policies, and selling them subsidized steel, the researchers said. These subsidies totaled about $91 billion between 2006 and 2013, they said.
The result: China added more than 30 new shipyards a year from 2006 to 2008. In that same period, Japan and South Korea, then the world’s top shipbuilding nations, averaged about one new shipyard a year.
Then, to make the industry more efficient via mergers, the Chinese government published a white list of shipbuilding firms that got preferential treatment.
“It wasn’t just that they were providing blanket subsidies and shipbuilders were jumping on the gravy train,” said Matthew Funaiole, a CSIS analyst. “There was also an effort to figure out: How can we consolidate this industry?”
Today, the Chinese shipyards are competitive on quality and have an overwhelming price edge. A boat under construction in Philadelphia that holds the equivalent of 3,600 20-foot containers costs $333 million to build. A similar ship would cost $55 million in China, shipowners say.
To catch up, U.S. lawmakers are proposing to create an American version of the Chinese state-backed push.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), a Navy veteran and former astronaut, has proposed the Ships for America Act. It would provide federal funding and incentives to revitalize domestic shipyards and build a strategic commercial fleet, in a process that would take at least a decade. The goal, they say, is to counter China’s ocean dominance.
The Ships Act proposed a new White House office focused on shipbuilding, an idea that Trump endorsed in his address to Congress.
While port fees on Chinese-built ships could offset some costs of the Ships Act, taxpayers will probably have to pick up much of the bill, said Funaiole, the analyst.
“The most important part of this is going to be sustained support and investment from the U.S. government,” he said. “It can’t be something you pay attention to for a year or two and then sit back and let the market take over.”
