The changing nature of naval power in the Pacific
China’s national shipbuilding surge is altering the balance of power in the Far East and signals a change in global naval supremacy.
In a nutshell
- China now enjoys quantitative and qualitative regional naval superiority
- U.S. shipbuilding atrophy is leading to a significant strategic disadvantage
- China is on track for global naval supremacy, challenging the U.S. and its allies
Over the course of the past 25 years, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has gone from being an army-centric, inadequately equipped military force with a mere coastal navy to the strongest naval power in Asia today. This transformation is the result of decades of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) prioritizing spending on the PLA Navy. Capital outlays have been taken to new heights with General Secretary Xi Jinping’s emphasis on the People’s Republic of China (PRC) becoming a great maritime power to achieve their stated goal of completing the “Great Rejuvenation” of China.
Beyond the political will of the CCP, this shift has been driven by differences in the United States’ and China’s shipbuilding capacity. As revealed by the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence in 2023, China is capable of producing more than 200 times the surface combatants and submarines than the U.S.
Facts & figures
Shipbuilding capacity: China vs. U.S.
This is attributed to the number of shipyards that each nation has available to produce warships and submarines, and each shipyard’s capabilities and capacity. For instance, China has 13 major naval shipyards, compared to the U.S.’ seven. Examining just one of the Chinese shipyards, Jiangnan Shipyard at the mouth of the Yangtze River near Shanghai, reveals a facility four times the size of Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia, America’s largest naval shipyard. Jiangnan alone has a capacity as large as all the rest of the U.S. shipyards combined.
As a result of this CCP grand strategy, the balance of naval power in the Western Pacific has been altered in favor of the Chinese Navy. For instance, the U.S. Navy went from having a 76-warship advantage over China in 2005 to having a 39-combatant deficiency in 2023, based on similar ship and submarine comparisons. That is a swing of 115 naval platforms in 23 years. This is a strategic trend that will continue uninterrupted for at least the next decade.
Facts & figures
Chinese seaborne power to dwarf the U.S. Navy
Chinese naval superiority: Quantity and quality
While some commentators suggest that the number of Chinese warships is an inadequate metric for measuring naval power because it does not account for the quality and capability of a navy, the reality is that the country’s navy is not just quantitatively superior, but is now also qualitatively superior.
For example, the PLA Navy’s Type 055 Renhai-class cruiser, which weighs over 12,000 tons, is a warship with 112 vertical launch system tubes that can fire an array of land-attack cruise missiles, surface-to-air missiles, and supersonic, anti-ship cruise missiles, like the YJ-18, which has a range of 300 kilometers. This makes it more lethal than similar weapon systems in the U.S. Navy. Given its size, speed, phased-array radar and other capabilities, this cruiser is arguably the most potent surface combatant on the planet. Today, the PLA Navy has eight operational Type 055 cruisers, with two more under construction, that are primarily designed to function as “shotguns” for China’s emergent aircraft carrier and expeditionary strike groups.
Given its size, speed, phased-array radar and other capabilities, this cruiser is arguably the most potent surface combatant on the planet.
While its carrier strike groups today are not yet of the same caliber as the U.S. Navy’s, the trend line is undeniable. In 2023, a mere 11 years after the first Chinese Navy Air Force fighter landed aboard the deck of their first aircraft carrier Liaoning, China’s second aircraft carrier, the Shandong, was already conducting “live-fire confrontation drills” in the South China Sea. China’s carrier operations now include nighttime launch-and-recoveries as well as blue-water operations in the mid-Pacific. The carriers have reached an unprecedented number of at-sea periods, rivaling days at sea by any U.S. carrier in the Western Pacific for the last year.
Furthermore, China’s third carrier, the 80,000-ton Fujian, has completed mooring trials and has begun sea trials with expected operational readiness by 2025. While conventionally powered, the Fujian is equipped with three electromagnetic catapults which reflects China’s urgency in upgrading its aircraft carrier force. By skipping a generation of technology, steam catapults, the Chinese Navy appears to be on track to have at least six functioning aircraft carrier strike groups by 2035 – a force, even with inferior individual aircraft carriers, that can dominate naval combat out to Guam in the near term and that lays the foundation for China’s goal of global naval-power projection.
Declining state of U.S. naval robustness
Interestingly, China’s commitment to building up its carrier and expeditionary strike groups comes against the backdrop of Washington questioning the efficacy and future of big-deck warships due to the proliferation of anticarrier missile systems (ballistic, cruise and hypersonic) and the general disarray of America’s shipbuilding industry.
The decrepit state of the U.S. shipbuilding industry was highlighted in April 2024, when the U.S. Navy announced major cumulative delays of more than 11 years for key shipbuilding programs. The announcement came at a time when lawmakers and Pentagon planners agreed that the navy needs to be modernizing and growing for a potential conflict in the Pacific.
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Most noteworthy from the April report – given the growing mismatch between the two navies – were the delays to the U.S. submarine force. The first Columbia-class submarine is now projected to be between 12 and 16 months late, and the fourth and fifth blocks of the Virginia-class submarine are estimated to be up to 36 months late. Delays to fielding existing and future U.S. Navy submarines take on critical importance as American defense planners have long believed the navy’s submarine force would be able to dominate the undersea domain. Such capabilities are necessary to defeat the PLA Navy’s counter-intervention strategy focused on sinking the U.S. Navy’s big-deck carriers.
Facts & figures
China's naval fleet size and weight on the rise
The downward trend of the U.S. Navy’s force size and shipbuilding infrastructure has been occurring over decades. It has transformed the military balance of power in the Western Pacific and now empowers the CCP’s expansionist regional and global goals.
Scenarios
Over the past decade, China commissioned 161 major combatants compared to 53 for the U.S. This trend is expected to continue. For example, although somewhat lower than the 200,000-ton annual average of warships and submarines launched and commissioned prior to the global pandemic, the Chinese total in 2023 was recovering and reached about 170,000 tons, compared with 110,000 tons in 2022.
As such, the challenge for the U.S. and its allies is complex and evolving, and it will not be solved in a single budget cycle or by election-year promises. The following scenarios are worth considering.
Likely: U.S. asymmetric approach
Traditional World War II fleet expansion solutions are neither fiscally possible nor physically sufficient to meet the challenge posed by China. A new approach that relies on the use of asymmetric weapons and networks is gaining recognition as the only solution that can be achieved in time to prepare for an expected Chinese “short, sharp war” to capture Taiwan that may happen within this “Decade of Concern” (2020-2030).
America’s likely asymmetric approach was recently revealed by the U.S. Indo-Pacific Commander, Admiral Sam Paparo, who outlined a new U.S. strategy. The plan is designed to quickly build and deploy thousands of new unmanned and autonomous systems that would swarm the Taiwan Strait and keep China’s military busy until more help can arrive.
Unlikely: American naval revitalization
Today, the size of the U.S. Navy (290 ships) is 30 ships fewer than its size prior to the passage of the first Congressional naval shipbuilding acts of 1938 and 1940. Collectively known as the “Two Ocean Navy Act,” the Congressional leadership recognized before the start of World War II that the U.S. Navy was weak and needed dramatic and immediate expansion.
Today, the Chinese Navy presents a similar threat to the U.S. and its allies and thus requires a national naval modernization, with a special emphasis on the submarine industrial base, both for new construction and repair capacity. But as noted above, traditional World War II solutions are not fiscally possible, and so a broader naval revitalization and fleet expansion is unlikely.
Least likely: Continuation of the status quo
Given China’s dramatic altering of the military balance of power in the Western Pacific and its increasingly belligerent actions in the maritime domain around Taiwan, the Senkaku Islands and in the South China Sea, there is now a growing consensus that its “peaceful rise” was nothing more than political propaganda to freeze the U.S. and its allies, preventing them from taking the necessary preparatory steps.
While there are still many within the U.S. who promote the necessity of engaging with China, their voices were diminished during the Trump administration and by subsequent aggressive actions by Beijing during the Biden administration, such as ballistic missile firings against Taiwan in August 2022, the use of water-cannons against Philippine fishermen or aggressive military actions against the U.S. and allies from Asia and Europe.
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