Class Year

2027

Document Type

Student Research Paper

Date of Creation

Fall 2025

Department 1

Political Science

Abstract

This paper examines how effectively China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have leveraged dual-use shipbuilding to support the naval modernization of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). While China’s commercial shipbuilding sector now dominates the global market and provides SOEs with massive economies of scale, workforce continuity, and supply chain depth, the ability to translate these advantages into advanced naval shipbuilding has been uneven. Drawing on theoretical frameworks of the developmental state and hidden developmental state, this analysis distinguishes between commercial and naval shipbuilding requirements and examines hull-level production data for major U.S. and Chinese surface combatant classes. The evidence suggests that dual-use practices successfully accelerated China’s naval buildup in time periods of simpler platforms, but the production of modern, high-end and high-displacement combatants increasingly resembles U.S.-style specialized naval construction. China’s primary advantage comes from small surface combatants and the number of shipyards and dry docks available for naval production, not from direct dual-use efficiency. The findings suggest that dual-use shipbuilding was well suited to China’s early modernization but will play a diminishing role as PLAN requirements shift toward complex systems integration.

Comments

This work was written for POL 475: Individualized Study.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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