Heavy Industry in the PoMo Age

I know a little bit about shipbuilding, and so I was interested to see a piece in the Times about China's plan to become the world's largest merchant shipbuilder by 2015, surpassing South Korea, which itself only recently surpassed Japan after decades of struggle.

That these East Asian powers have all relied on shipbuilding to modernize their economies is unsurprising, given the industry's historical role in accelerating developing economies. Though the article doesn't provide much history, the center of world shipbuilding only shifted to the Pacific Ocean in the 1960s, when Japan displaced Great Britain as the world's largest shipbuilder. Until then, Britain had jockeyed with several developing nations for that not-insignficant title, including both Germany and the United States during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

In short, shipbuilding has long been a major tool of modernization. The high costs of entering and competing in the industry can be offset, when the industry is managed intelligently, by enormous profits from ships - which are, as the article says, "some of the most complex products on the world market" - and by rapid gains in workforce skill and wages. Every successful shipbuilding nation - whether Britain in the 1900s, the U.S. in the 1840s, Japan in the 1970s, or South Korea today - has pursued a broad strategy of industrial growth that combines this quintessential heavy industry with light or "high-tech" manufacturing, from machine tools in the 19th century to electronics in the 20th. China, of course, is currently the world's workshop, and - like Japan in the 1960s - is likely to use its ships to export its goods, which helps keeps profits at home. Like previous major shipbuilders, China also unabashedly showers its yards with state subsidies.

While not every country that tries to use shipbuilding in this way has succeeded in rising to the first tier of world economies (Brazil has so far failed to do so, for instance), China seems likely to successfully use shipbuilding as a lever of greater modernization. And as the article hints, with shipbuilding acumen comes not only greater commercial strength but greater military strength. This is the classic ulterior motive of developing a shipbuilding industry, and has been since the Venetians mastered the galley. The Pax Britannica Royal Navy is the paragon here, but who knows what we might see in 2035 - Chinese tankers and warships moored off Richmond, California?