China Outbuilt the U.S. by Over 2X in Naval Tonnage in 2024–25. Here’s How Beijing Outpaced America
China produced more than twice the ship tonnage of the United States in 2024–25, a new report says, indicating Beijing is closing the naval gap with Washington.
The World Defense Shipbuilding report, compiled by Flottes de Combat and the French maritime industry association Gican and released ahead of the Euronaval defense show, states that China built about 636,208 tons of combat ships over two years through December 2025, while the United States built about 270,509 tons in the same period.
China accounted for more than a third of the global naval tonnage built in 2024-25, the report states, presenting the magnitude of China’s shipbuilding capability.
“We are seeing a fairly substantial expansion of naval forces, and consequently of shipbuilding,” Philippe Missoffe, Gican’s general director, said in a press briefing on October 20. “We’re seeing an increase in power capabilities, particularly nuclear-powered attack submarines, for example,” he added.
In the two-year period, China’s combat-vessel building was valued at $43.5 billion, while US construction totaled $26.8 billion, according to the report. It also notes that China’s shipyards produced 202,520 tons in 2022–2023, while the US produced 245,703 tons in the previous two-year period, indicating a clear year-on-year surge for China.
The US Navy still leads China in the overall fleet tonnage.
As of January 1, 2026, US warships weighing more than 200 tons totaled 3.11 million tons, compared with China’s 1.44 million tons, says the report. However, just two years ago, the figures were 3.22 million tons for the US and 1.3 million tons for China, showing how Beijing is closing the displacement gap.
China has already surpassed the US Navy in ship count. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has more than 370 battle-force ships, whereas the US Navy has over 290.
This gap is expected to further increase. US-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) predicted in its 2025 report titled “Ship Wars – Confronting China’s Dual-Use Shipbuilding Empires” that China would have a 425-ship-strong fleet by 2030, compared to the US Navy’s 300 vessels.
That said, adding more tonnage is different from simply churning out ships faster, which a navy can do by producing many small or medium-sized ones. Meanwhile, tonnage measures the total displacement of those ships. One large destroyer or amphibious ship can displace as much as several smaller frigates, and higher tonnage means more overall mass in the fleet, more weapons, sensors, fuel, aviation facilities, troops, and endurance.
Currently, China appears to be doing both, expanding the fleet by accelerating production of smaller combatants while also adding displacement to bigger, more sophisticated vessels. The strategy is meant to make the PLAN combat-ready in the future.
Notably, the latest Euronaval report findings are significant but hardly surprising, given that American senators and congressional researchers have repeatedly warned that the US may not be able to keep up with Beijing’s growing naval fleet because of China’s ever-expanding shipbuilding capacity, and the delays and bottlenecks in US naval production.
As of now, the US Navy has many qualitative advantages over the PLAN, including 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, a large and capable submarine force, greater overall tonnage, higher missile capacity per ship in many classes, and extensive combat experience. However, these could erode if China sustains high output of modern ships.
For now, China producing more naval tonnage than the US reflects a sustained advantage in Chinese industrial capacity. However, Beijing did not build twice the tonnage of the United States from a purely military-industrial base.
Its ability to expand naval tonnage production compared with the US stems from its enormous dual-use shipbuilding industry and economies of scale the US no longer has.

Civilian-Military Fusion Is Driving Construction
China’s maritime development has accelerated as the lines between military and commercial shipbuilding have blurred, as in other strategic areas.
The China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC)—the world’s largest shipbuilder—is the poster child for China’s seamless fusion of civil and military shipbuilding capabilities.
The CSSC operates several shipyards, factories, and research institutes under the oversight of China’s top political and military leadership. It has built warships for the Chinese Navy, including the Type 003 Fujian aircraft carrier, the Type 055 destroyers, and the Type 075 amphibious assault ships, among other popular combat ships.
At the same time, it is acing civilian shipbuilding. The CSSC built more commercial vessels by tonnage in 2024 than the entire US shipbuilding industry had since WWII, as the EurAsian Times reported earlier. Chinese shipbuilders produced 53.69 million deadweight tons (DWT) of commercial vessels in 2025, or about 56.1% of the world’s output. They also scored 107.82 million DWT in new orders, and closed the year with an orderbook of 274.42 million DWT, or 66.8% of the global outstanding work.
Order volume from foreign customers suggests the world is rapidly becoming dependent on Chinese shipyards to meet demand for commercial trading vessels, allowing the CSSC to redirect commercial revenue toward naval warship construction.
The expansion of China’s commercial shipbuilding industry directly supports higher naval tonnage production, primarily through shared physical infrastructure, including the same large dry docks, slipways, heavy-lift cranes, and fabrication halls used to build container ships, tankers, and bulk carriers, to build warships. In fact, several major CSSC shipyards routinely build commercial vessels and naval ships side by side, meaning that China does not need a completely separate, underutilized set of military-only yards.
Open-source analysis and satellite imagery have documented this physical integration of civil and military ships on multiple occassions. For instance, gray-hulled battleships and commercial hulls were previously seen being built concurrently at the huge Changxing Island complex in Shanghai. It is not much different at other shipyards in Dalian, Hudong-Zhonghua, and the Longxue Island complex near Guangzhou.
Not every Chinese yard is dual-use in the same way, and some high-end naval facilities have become more specialized as the PLA Navy moves toward larger, more complex platforms. In fact, a 2024 RAND working paper noted that certain yards producing the newest surface combatants and carriers had reduced their commercial output.
Nonetheless, wherever civil-military fusion is widespread, commercial work keeps tens or hundreds of thousands of skilled welders, fitters, engineers, and managers employed year-round. This basically gives it an experienced labor pool it can direct toward naval projects.
Moreover, sustained commercial volume accelerates learning and process improvements that transfer to warship building.
China’s astounding rise in commercial shipbuilding has given it access to dual-use technologies such as specialized engines and propellers, navigation and control systems, integrated electronics, and radar modules.
Another advantage of this civil-military fusion is that the high-volume commercial production creates robust domestic supply chains for steel, engines, electrical systems, coatings, and other components. China uses these suppliers to support naval ships.
Additionally, high supply volumes drive down unit costs through economies of scale.
The machinery keeps running smoothly, with revenue flowing in from expanding commercial orders. These profitable commercial contracts, many from foreign buyers, generate cash flow that Beijing uses to fund yard expansion, integrate new equipment, and upgrade technology.
However, China’s rise as a shipbuilder did not happen overnight. It resulted from a long-term strategy that combined government support, investment in industrial infrastructure, a large workforce, and an extensive domestic supply chain. China developed the capacity to manufacture ships at an enormous scale while ensuring that many of the materials, components, and industrial facilities needed for production were available domestically. This helped Chinese shipyards become highly competitive in cost, capacity, and output.
“China has risen because, in 2015, they declared that seas are the future of prosperity and trade. Therefore, China needed to build robust maritime infrastructure and a strong PLAN to protect its interests.
These are two factors that made them realize that shipbuilding infrastructure should serve a twin purpose, so the facility can be used to its full potential since this infrastructure is expensive to build,” Vice Admiral Shekhar Sinha, a retired Indian Navy officer, earlier told the EurAsian Times.
By contrast, the US lacks this industrial base and has struggled to expand shipbuilding capacity to counter Beijing.
It is now deliberately drawing on the advanced commercial and naval shipbuilding expertise of its closest Indo-Pacific partners, including South Korea and Japan, to bolster shipbuilding and prevent delivery delays and cost increases that have become common for US Navy programs.
However, the latest figure suggests Washington may have to do more, and faster.
China’s sustained high output of modern ships, underwritten by dual-use commercial strength, continues to narrow the quantitative gap. The United States retains qualitative and experiential advantages for now, but those edges are not permanent.
- Contact the author at sakshi.tiwari13 (at) outlook.com
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