The West is funding China's navy and the largest dual-use ship building capacity ever

PLAN´s exercises have increased over the last couple of months.

The most dangerous shipyards in the world aren't just building warships. They're building cargo ships for the world.

A single Chinese firm, China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC), has delivered 250+ ships (14 million gross tons) in 2024, according to a recent detailed report by Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Hidden Reach.

That’s more tonnage than the entire U.S. commercial shipbuilding industry has produced since World War II. Let that sink in.

In comparison: In 2024: U.S. shipyards produced just 5 commercial ships (76,000 gross tons total).

But the real problem is: China’s shipyards are mostly dual-use or can be switched in wartimes. Warships and merchant vessels are built side-by-side.

Civilian orders today sustain the same facilities that will build and repair warships tomorrow or already do. This is not hypothetical.

Between 2019 and 2024: Foreign companies bought over 70% of all ships built in China.

That includes over 300 ships from top-tier naval yards — the same ones that build China’s destroyers and amphibious assault ships. Buyers included firms from Japan, South Korea, France, Denmark, and Taiwan — many of them formal U.S. allies.

And it gets worse, even Taiwan relies on Chines shipyards. One example: Taiwan-based Evergreen Marine Corporation has had over 15% of its global fleet built in the same shipyards that manufacture ships for the Chinese navy. Even two U.S.-based firms placed orders with these yards.

To look at the bigger picture, this isn't about trade. It is about how trade is used to scale military production—fast - and to leverage existing technologies that are sold or co-developed from companies that ordered from Chinese shipbuilders. Same or similar designs and technology can be used in Chinese warships.

This is China’s military-civil fusion strategy at work: Sustain the dual-use or convertible shipbuilding base with foreign demand and overtake the West when it comes to quantity of ships, speed of building, and eventually in some years quality.

Additionally, infrastructure built for civilian ships can be quickly converted for wartime production when needed.

China is now not just the world’s dominant commercial shipbuilder. It is using that dominance to subsidise, scale, and speed up its military build-up at sea.

And the West and Chinese adversaries in the region are helping pay for it.

This is a strategic wake-up call for policy makers in the US, South Korea, and Taiwan.