Broadsheet

This is the second part of our series (I) discussing the basic contours of life – birth, marriage, labor, subsistence, death – of pre-modern peasants and their families. As we’ve discussed, pre-modern peasant farmers make up the vast majority of human beings in in the past.¹ Last week we started by looking at the basic building blocks of peasant society: the household and the village. We noted that rather than organizing as individuals, pre-modern people generally and peasant farmers in particular, organized as households, a single economic unit based around a residence and landholding, which included both kin and non-kin members. Those households were then organized into villages, with each household often having scattered land holdings in different parts of the village’s farmland.

In this part and the next, I want to get into some of the demographic patterns that shape the life of these pre-modern farmers. While cultural practices differ quite a lot between different people in the past, the mortality and fertility regime that shaped the life of pre-modern farmers tended to be quite consistent between different pre-modern societies – at least to the degree that they are so radically different from conditions now. This week, we’re going to begin at the ending, with mortality patterns, because they provide necessary foundational context for all of the other demographic patterns. The pattern of mortality among pre-modern people doesn’t exist that far in the past – everyone lived and died like this through the 1700s – but is so different from our experience today as to be profoundly alien to us. It isn’t just that people lived shorter lives in the past, but that the structure of mortality and the expectations it created were different.

Naturally, I should note then before we head in, that this post is going to involve some pretty frank discussions of death – mostly from a statistical angle – including child and maternal mortality. I’ve also included some images of death-related artwork to help anchor the reader’s thinking about the culture of death in these societies. That may be somewhat distressing (I suppose it certainly ought to be), so read at your discretion.

Via Wikipedia, an example from Beram in Istria of the ‘danse macabre’ (‘the dance of death’) motif in fresco (1474). Death was a fairly common theme in pre-modern artwork, often presented, as here, quite bluntly as ‘memento mori’ – a reminder that all must die sooner or later.

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Death By the Numbers

It may seem odd to start with death, since after all that is normally the end of a story rather than the beginning. But if we want to understand the structure of life in pre-modern conditions, we really do need to start with death because mortality is, in practice, the ‘forcing function’ of a lot of how life is organized in peasant communities and the pre-modern world more generally. In particular the pattern of mortality of pre-industrial life combined with drive to sustain population functionally mandate certain family patterns among the vast majority of the population, which in turn drive labor patterns. This is particularly true for the peasantry: we often do see upper-classes in pre-modern societies fall below population replacement, but that is no real problem for the society, because there is an effectively infinite supply of people from the lower orders perfectly happy to ‘move up’ into the aristocracy.² By contrast, there is no ‘reserve’ population to replace the peasantry (understood here to include enslaved agricultural laborers) – instead it is their population growth which sustains the other social orders. So high mortality forces high fertility.

Of course that’s not quite how the causation picture works: high fertility is the result of human choices (and they are, as we’ll see choices), but high mortality rates limit the range of fertility patterns capable of producing a stable population, not quite down to a single point, but to a sufficiently narrowly constricted range at the upper-end of possible fertility. A society which moved out of this range at the lower end would rapidly shrink, creating space for societies (or families within a society) which maintained higher fertility. In practice, this doesn’t result in some sort of ‘rising and declining civilizations’ that one sometimes sees discussed in moralizing, largely a-historical ‘class of civilization’ terms, but rather a situation where all societies put a pretty high value on childrearing and so, absent serious disruptions which prevent it, maintain steady, modest growth at the upper-end of the fertility range, with only modest variation. Again, that range isn’t a point – there are some different marriage and family formation patterns – but that range exists in the context of a mortality regime which is functionally unchanging for all pre-modern societies.

And I want to be clear and reiterate that last point, because it is the other reason we’re starting with death: the basic pattern of pre-modern mortality changes very little from one society to another or from one pre-industrial era to another. It also varies very little from one class to another: the fantastically wealthy aristocracies of pre-modern and early-modern societies could buy many fantastical things, but nothing they could spend money on would do much to preserve their children from shockingly high child mortality rates (they may have been somewhat better at surviving longer in adulthood, but only marginally). Until the 1700s, no society’s medicine could meaningfully change the pattern either. The major features of mortality are thus constant in a way that very few things are truly constant in studying historical societies.

Via Wikipedia, a Roman mosaic (first century BCE) from Pompeii, now in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, showing the wheel of fate which oscillates between wealth and poverty (represented by the cloth suspended on either side). The skull in the center on which the scales balance is a reminder that death in this balance is universal and never far off.

So what were the patterns? This is a point where the way we walk about pre-modern mortality tends to skew people’s understanding, because the statistic we lead with is life expectancy at birth (note that we’re not dealing with stillbirths or miscarriages this week). What you’ll hear is “life expectancy [at birth] was around 24 – somewhat higher for females, somewhat lower for males.” And that’s more or less true – the exact figure will wobble around depending on the society and the data set, but never gets far from the mid-twenties – but can be somewhat deceptive. I remember realizing that someone had fundamentally misunderstood something when I was playing Children of the Nile and when your ruler turns 20 or so, the game informs you that you are old and must think constantly about death. But obviously a 20-year-old – peasant or aristocrat – did not think death was right around the corner, because it usually wasn’t. Instead, that basic life expectancy figure is the product of a set of more complex interactions.

We can think about these patterns through demographic modeling: we take the ancient or medieval data we have and look for a modern demographic model (often based off of the study of populations in developing societies) that fits the patterns we see. The standard such model for the ancient world is Model West, usually L3, from Coale and Demeny, Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations (1983),³ because it fits the data out of Roman Egypt fairly well. One quirk to these model tables I want to note, because it sometimes confuses folks, is that they express ‘life expectancy’ not as a total expected age, but as average years of life expectancy from a given age, so a 25-year-old with 26.6 years of life expectancy is expecting to life to age 51, not just a year and a half.

What we see in these models is that life expectancy (female:male) at birth is very low, 25:22.8, but after the first year rises dramatically to 34.9:34.1 (note the gender gap narrowing) and by age 5 to 40.1:39.0 (remember to add the five years they’ve already lived). So life expectancy goes up quite a lot over the first several years of life, which is not, intuitively, the pattern we expect: we normally assume the more you’ve lived, the less years you have left.

A quick chart showing a population under the assumptions of a Model West L3 life table. The blue bar indicates the percentage of a birth cohort that is surviving at a given age, while the orange bar indicates the percentage **of a birth cohort** that has died in each age ‘jump’ (the Coale and Demeny tables are incremented in five year increments; I keep meaning to sit down with a demographer and produce a version with each year interpolated between the increments)

What is going on here is the substantial impact of absolutely staggering infant and child mortality. Under these assumptions, by age 10, fully 50% of all children born are already dead; only about 45% of all children make it to adulthood as we generally define it (around 18 years). And as a reminder that is only for live births – we have not yet considered miscarriages, stillbirths or maternal mortality. This enormous child mortality rate is not an accident of a particular ancient society, but in fact an absolute constant for all pre-industrial societies, be they hunter-gatherers, pastoralists or farmers, be they urbanized or not, ‘civilized’ or not, ‘western’ or not. For all societies, everywhere at every time before about 1750 (and in most places for a long time after that) it was simply a fact of life that half, HALF of all children died. Our World in Data produced a famous chart of this ( released under CC-BY which I can just put here:

Youth mortality (deaths before age 15 or so) in modern developed countries today is a fraction of 1%; even poor developing countries are below 10% in all but the worst cases (the global average is 4.3%). That shift is, of course, part of the broader ‘demographic transition,’ which perhaps we’ll talk about one day, but I want to stress it here because it is one of the most striking ways in which “the past is a foreign country,” although in this case the past is even more alien than any foreign country on earth.

Adult mortality patterns can vary a bit more based on the society in question and by conditions, but the basic outline of mortality rates remains fairly constant. Generally early adulthood brought with it two major mortality ‘filters’ – despite young adults being the least vulnerable to sickness and such – military mortality (mostly for men) and maternal mortality (entirely for women). Military mortality for our peasants, as you might imagine, varied quite a bit based on society. In some societies, the peasantry was substantially demilitarized, ruled over by a warrior-aristocratic class that did much of the fighting or protected by a professional military class and so we might expect military mortality among the peasantry to be very low. On the other end of the spectrum, Nathan Rosenstein⁴ estimates that military mortality may have claimed something like a third of all Romans who served during the third and early second centuries BCE – and as we’ve discussed, nearly all Roman males served, at least in periods of high military demand. I should note that there are a lot of complications in this data, so take that military mortality rate as something like an absolute upper-bound.⁵

Casualties from pitched battles might average around 10% of all combatants,⁶ so a male peasant population that served as a militia in these sort of battles, like Greek hoplites (who are probably just the upper third or so of peasants, wealth-wise) might lose something like 4.5% of a male birth cohort (remember that child mortality) on average in a pitched battle. If we assume that a given age cohort might fight 2 or 3 such battles in their lifetimes, which seems a reasonable guess, we might expect something like 10-12% of the relevant military class’ birth cohort to die in battle. If I’m right in guesstimating that the hoplite class represented the upper third or so of the farming population (the rest being too poor or enslaved) we might suppose battle casualties would have consumed around 4-5% of the whole society’s male birth cohort. Expressed another way, that would mean that 10% of all males surviving to adulthood would perish in combat.⁷ Rosenstein estimates the average combat mortality rate of Roman legions during the Republic – legions that tend to win rather a disproportionate amount of the time – at around 5.6%.⁸ In short, for societies that field mass conscript armies, military mortality is a significant factor, but pales in comparison to child mortality. Under these conditions, individual battles or wars will almost never be demographically significant (that is, cause noticeable change in population) because casualties are a fairly small subset of the fairly small subset of men who serve. However, the sustained pressure of such warfare might male-shift a society slightly and lead to altered family patterns.

Via Wikipedia, a sample of woodcuts by Hans Holbein the Younger showing the Danse Macabre (1538). One of the notable features of the danse macabre as an artistic motif is that it very frequently shows death striking a wide range of individuals, typically including the wealthy and powerful (kings, nobles) alongside the poor (farmers and peddlers but also a frequent motif is to include a disabled man who has lost a leg and is clearly very poor), with both secular figures alongside members of the clergy, both high and low, all to stress death’s universality: here we see death stalking the farmer, an abbess and a peddler.

The other factor for young adult mortality, pertaining in this case to women was maternal mortality (death as a result of childbirth). This is something of a tricky topic because there is a tendency to substantially overestimate maternal mortality rates in the public imagination, which makes it really tricky to thread the needle of “higher than now but not as high as you think” without giving some sort of false impression. Maternal mortality is expressed as a fraction of live births (which I am going to convert into percents) and seems to have been very roughly in the range of 1-2% for early modern societies, falling to around 0.5% in the 19th century among western societies for which we have good data and then dropping down to its current level among developed countries of 0.25-0.01%. So we generally assume that a pattern of something like 2% maternal mortality is the right ballpark range for the ancient and medieval world, although there must have been variation we can’t see.

Now, 2% doesn’t, perhaps, sound like a lot, but in a society where something like half of all children are dying before adulthood, women are having quite a lot of children simply to maintain population at replacement. We’ll get back around to fertility rates later in the series but for how if we assume each woman in this society is having on average five live childbirths, a 2% chance of death at each stage adds up pretty quickly – a woman who gave birth five times with a 2% chance of dying each time has a total chance of dying at one stage or another of 9.67%, which as you will note is not far off from the chance of dying in a battle (though, contra the House of the Dragon team, who do not appear to understand statistics, it is not that each birth has the fatality of a battle but that a lifetime of births does, which is not the same).

The great remainder of death, the background hum of it, as it were, was from sickness and disease. I should note that this is generally what we mean when we say someone died ‘of old age’ – they were not crushed to death by the prodigious number of candles on their birthday cake, but they merely got quite sick while also being old, the latter factor reducing their ability to handle the former. While in modern society these causes of death tend to be the sort of things – heart failure, cancer – which will kill you at any age but mostly only happen to the very old, in pre-modern societies, the diseases that tear at the elderly population tend to be the endemic infections, fevers, pneumonias and such that the younger adult population might generally survive – age and nutrition diminish the immune response until these sicknesses become lethal at one age or another.

The patterns of these age-and-illness related deaths were markedly seasonal, precisely because they were made lethal by weakness of immunity, which correspond with age but also nutrition. The precise ‘dying season’ varied from one region to the other based on climate and on the timing of key crops. In much of Europe it was the colder months that death stalked whereas in the Mediterranean it was late summer and early fall. Climate is certainly one factor here: individuals with fragile health are more vulnerable to excessive heat or cold temperatures and either can kill.

But another factor is nutrition in the agricultural cycle: warmer climates often planted winter wheat (harvested early in the summer) and had their dying season in late summer, early fall, while cold climates plant spring wheat (harvested in fall) and having their dying season in the winter. It’s not hard to see the agricultural cycle at work: harvests are quite variable, ample in some years and short in others. Peasant farmers have all sorts of ways to protect against this risk (we’ll discuss some of them in this series), but a poor harvest still meant belt-tightening and you didn’t wait for the food to run out to begin rationing. So if the harvest was poor, food for children and the elderly has to be limited (the working-age adults cannot be short-changed, they need to be fit enough to plant and bring in the next crop) starting at that harvest and so a few months later when the weather turns bad (too hot or too cold), the already malnourished elderly or very young begin to die. Not of starvation, but of this or that disease or infection which, had they been fully fed, they might have fought off.

Via the British Museum (1926,0412.41) a modern sketch (by Paul-Albert Besnard, 1920) that was too on-point for me not to include, showing death embracing a woman while the snow of winter falls outside. I should note that while I have framed this series as being about ancient and medieval peasants, the basic contours of this pre-industrial life persisted in much of the world through the 19th century and into the 20th and some elements of it persist in some of the poorest countries today.

That interaction produces something of a balancing effect, assuming agricultural production remains constant: as a population approaches its food production limits, you get more bad years compared to good years and so mortality rises, with the child mortality putting a cap on population growth (along with reducing overall adult life expectancy as older folks pass away earlier). Now this simple interaction is very simple and leads a lot of folks into Malthusian purist thinking, but there are a lot of things that can disrupt this Malthusian interaction, even for peasants – there are a lot of ways for agricultural production to rise modestly enough (increased trade and specialization, bringing more land under crops, better farming techniques, selectively bred crops, etc. etc.) to sustain population growth for a really, really long time and even some very long-settled parts of the world didn’t reach agricultural saturation where basically all useful farmland was in production, until quite late.⁹

The basic pattern of mortality: massive child mortality, military and maternal mortality for young adults, seasonal mortality for everyone else, combined with the standard background noise of accident, misadventure and crime collectively makes up the mortality picture of the peasant. I should note that there probably is a significant amount of regional and sub-regional variation here we’re not capturing, but the overall patterns here are fairly consistent.¹⁰ We’re going to get to the implications that has for the structure of peasant households in just a moment, but first I want to talk about some of the implications for culture and in particular, the culture of death.

Attitudes About Death

While the patterns – very high infant and child mortality, high maternal mortality, strongly seasonal disease-related mortality – are broadly consistent across pre-modern societies, and thus the standard condition of life for our ancient or medieval peasants, the cultural response to this is varied.

The usual mistaken assumption here is to assume that given the high rate of infant and early childhood mortality that parents and society at large was broadly detached from its children. As Patricia Crone points out (op. cit., 116-7) that is simply not the case: while written sources intended for public audiences often assume a polite silence about children lost very young, expressions of agony and grief are far more common in the source material than detachment. Pre-modern peasant parents went through the same cycles of excitement at a welcome pregnancy (and, as we’ll see, most were welcome) and terrible, wrenching loss that modern parents would at the loss of an infant. But people in the past experienced the same feelings we do, even in a far less kind world, something that comes out quite clearly when they do write to us. By way of example, I’m going to include in quote blocks a handful of epitaphs from E.A Hemelrijk’s excellent Women and Society in the Roman World: A Sourcebook of Inscriptions from the Roman West (2021).

To Claudia Fortunata. Claudia Quartilla set this up for her sweetest daughter Julia Foebe, for her mother and Claudius Felix and Claudius Fortunatus for their most dutiful sister. Oh unworthy crime: a mother made a tomb for her daughter! (CIL 9,4255, trans. Hemelrijk)

To the spirits of the departed. For Euposia, who lived for one year, eleven months and seventeen days, and for Zosime, who lived for eight months. Their mother Zoe made [this tomb] for her sweetest children. (IGUR 544 = IG 14,1609, trans. Hemelrijk).

All sorts of cultural practices attest to the person-hood of even very young children, like the Christian practice of infant baptism, performed as early as possible to ensure the salvation of the child’s soul in case – as was very often the case, note above – they didn’t live to adulthood. Likewise, the loving, careful burial of deceased infants and young children is common, including practices like “eaves-drip burial” in medieval Christian cemeteries or the ’emergency’ baptism of stillborn infants in medieval Italy all attest to a deep and profound attachment to children, even those lost extremely young. It wasn’t that peasants cared less, but that they lived in a world with much more grief, albeit that grief might be channeled into non-public expressions or expressions that don’t survive to us.

To the spirits of the departed. Aemilia Donativa lived one year, four months and thirteen days. She lies here. She lived sweeter than a rose. Turbo, her father and Designata, her mother, made this for their daughter. (CIL 8, 16572 = ILAlg 1,3165, trans. Hemelrijk)

To the departed spirit of Cornelia Anniana, our daughter who was already babbling when she was not yet two years old. She lived one year, three months and ten days. The parents made this with their own money for the sweetest daughter. (CIL 14,2482=ILS 8488, trans. Hemelrijk)

On the other hand, that grief was, if not lessened, expected. In these societies, burying children was an expected part of being a parent. Likewise, burying a young wife lost in childbirth was, while not an inevitable expectation, hardly an unheard of thing. That didn’t make it any less impactful. Funeral epitaphs like the following (also from Hemelrijk, op. cit.) are very common:

To the departed spirits and eternal memory of Blandinia Martiola, the most blameless girl who lives eighteen years, nine months and five days. Pompeius Catussa, citizen of the Sequani, a plasterer , set this up for his incomparable wife, who was most kind to him. She lived with me for five years, six months and eighteen days without any foul reproach. He had this made during his lifetime for himself and for his wife and dedicated it under the axe. You who read this, go bathe in the baths of Apollo, as I did with my wife. I wish I still could (CIL 13,1983 = ILS 8158, trans. Hemelrijk).

You who pass by, now stand still and linger for a while. Read the misfortune of a mourning man. Read what I, Trebius Basileus, her grieving husband, have written so that you may know that the writing below comes from the heart. She was adorned with all good things, unoffending to her dear ones, guileless, a woman who never committed any wrongdoing. She lived twenty one years and seven months and bore me three sons, whom she left behind when they were small children. Pregnant with her fourth child, she was died in the eighth month. Stunned, now examine the initial latters of the verses and willingly read, I pray, the epiath of a well-deserving woman. You will recognize the name of my beloved [Grata] wife. (CIL 6, 28753, trans Hemelrijk; the Latin forms an acrostic spelling out the name of the deceased, Veturia Grata).

That said the expectation meant that the social script around death in these societies was generally very strong. Cultural practices around mourning, burial (or cremation) and memory varied substantially, but anyone growing up to adulthood in a peasant village was likely to have experienced quite a lot of funerals and so while death wasn’t any less sad, it was processed to a degree as a ‘normal’ part of life rather than a sudden disruption of it.

From Roman Egypt, a collection of mummy portraits, painted faces on wood slats which would be buried with the deceased to enable their spirit to recognize their body, a distinctly Egyptian burial custom (though note the very Roman cultural presentation of these men – they are **both** Egyptian and Roman, there was no necessary contradiction between the two).
All via the British Museum these mummy portraits are:
Top Row (starting from the left): inv. EA74715, dated 100-120AD; EA 74718, dated 80-100AD; EA74704, dated 150-170 AD, all from Hawara in the Faiyum, Egypt.
Bottom Row (from the left): EA63396, early second century from Rubaiyat, Egypt, EA 63396, early second century from Rubaiyat Egypt and EA74707, 70-120 AD, from Hawara in the Faiyum, Egypt. All six are now in the British Museum.

This isn’t the place for me to go into every sort of death ritual for every pre-modern peasant culture because there are too many and I don’t know them all. But I do want to note some common features that show up frequently (but not universally). One of the most striking is that funerary rituals often focus substantially on the continuing place of the deceased in the community. We’ll come back around to this, but, as Crone observes repeatedly, pre-modern societies were markedly less individualistic than most modern societies, understanding individuals primarily as parts of a household, a family, a community rather than as individuals. That didn’t change when those individuals died.

So, for instance, in addition to the remarkably individualistic tombstone inscriptions above (the Romans are, as ancient cultures go, unusually individualistic in their outlook), the Romans believed that, after the standard nine-day period of mourning, funeral procession and burial that the spirit of the deceased became part of the di manes, (the ‘divine spirits’). The ancestor spirits watched over the family and community but also remained very much a part of it. Nine days after the death of the deceased, the Romans would hold another funeral feast which would include an offering to the di manes, of which the deceased was now a part. Likewise, of course, in medieval Christian contexts (both Catholic and Orthodox) the deceased were to be buried (if baptized) in consecrated ground to await the resurrection of the dead. This too represented not an exit of the individual from the community but rather something closer to a changing of their position in it: from the active, living part of the community to the waiting, expectant part. Ancient Egyptian belief represented the afterlife as a continuation of the living world, with individuals assuming the same roles in death as in life, while the remembrance and offerings of the living family of the deceased sustained their spirit another form of a continuation of the individual’s place in the community.

There is a tendency in this context, I think, for moderns to jump to asking, ‘well, what if the community ceases to exist, or many centuries pass and this memory is lost?’ And I’m not going to say no one ever had that idea, but by and large I think that is a very modern view that understands the world as impermanent and changing in a way that most pre-modern societies do not. From the perspective not just of the peasant, but also the peasant’s priest, humans are impermanent, fleeting things but the world, its structure and rhythms, its communities and families, these are far more permanent and lasting. This is a pre-modern world, after all, that changes slowly, often imperceptibly slowly, with children coming to inhabit the exact roles, working the same land, living in the same houses, as their parents, one generation after another. At least to my sense, planning for a radically different world 10,000 years in the future sits largely outside the pre-modern worldview which imagines that the world doesn’t change much and at most goes through a series of repeating cycles.

Implications for Households

The mortality pattern as laid out here has a few implications for the shape of the peasant households we see and the sort of families they form. We’re going to walk through some of these in more detail in the next part where we talk about nuptiality and fertility (marriage and babies) but I want to note some of the high points here.

First a high proportion of these societies at any given time were children, even by their standards of childhood (often ending between 15 and 17, not at 18). Generally about half of the population at any given time under this mortality regime is going to be age 15 and below, whereas for a modern population close to replacement that figure is going to be 20-25%. Children were thus socially omnipresent in a way that they simply aren’t in any modern industrial society (but are in some developing countries).

Equally, for societies with very low productivity the demand to feed that population means that pre-modern cultures do not have a ‘childhood’ as we understand it, as an extended vacation from work and adult life. Children were instead working in whatever capacity they were physically able as soon as they were physically able because these societies simply lacked the resources to support half of the population on a non-working basis (which is also going to be true when it comes to labor and gender, but we’ll get to that later in the series). This, of course, was especially true for our peasants, at the bottom of the society, whose work was necessary for its basic subsistence, but one gets the sense that childhoods were short and transition into work was common even among the higher rungs of society – for instance the age for an elite boy to become a page attending a knight was seven.

This mortality regime also has implications for the ‘cycle’ that households went through. After all, if a married couple began having children in their late teens and continued doing so through their twenties (which they would have to do simply to make replacement; we’ll talk more about this next time), by the time their last children would be coming of age, the parents would be into their late thirties or early forties and a casual glance at the graph way up above will tell you that many of those parents are, at that point, living out their last years. Under the assumptions of that Model West L3 life table, at the start of reproductive age, the life expectancy – which is to say the point at which we’d expect half of the cohort to have passed away – for women was around 50 and for men around 48. So most children would reach adulthood while their parents were still living, but equally most children would lose their parents while their own children were very young. That interaction is further influenced by marriage patterns (particularly differential ages at first marriage), which we’ll talk about subsequently.

But the result is that while these households are often ‘multigenerational,’ and (as we’ll see) marriage and reproduction often begin very early, ‘three’ is generally the maximum generations that are alive at one time and even then usually not for very long. That also helps explain cultures where young men were expected to have property in order to marry and establish a household – the expectation is not that they are acquiring land (extremely hard to do in these societies) but rather that inheriting land is what will make them viable marriage partners (again, that differential age at marriage). Under this mortality regime, a young man in his early 20s probably does not have to wait very long to inherit the farm (especially because his father likely also married somewhat later in life).

Finally, and this will set up the next part of this series, it should already be obvious that the fertility regime this level of mortality demands in order to avoid the population shrinking into nothing in just a few generations is going to be one of very high fertility: simply maintaining population under conditions where half of all children die before adulthood and many adults die early in adulthood (especially women dying in childbirth) is going to necessitate a lot of children.

And that’s where we’ll turn next: marriage, family formation and childbearing (but not rearing just yet).

Taisun crane at the Yantai Raffles shipyard in China.

Since 2017, China has been the largest shipbuilder in the world. Of the 89 million deadweight tons of commercial ships built in 2024, 50.8 million of them (57%) were Chinese.1 China has a similarly large fraction (59%) of orders for new ships worldwide. Of the 20 largest shipyards in the world by the size of their order book, 14 of them are Chinese. According to the US Navy, China’s shipbuilding capacity is over 200 times that of the US. In 2023 China delivered 972 commercial ships; the US delivered 7.

China’s shipbuilding dominance didn’t happen overnight, but followed years of effort, investment, successes, and setbacks: China’s was left with little to no shipbuilding capabilities following the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, and it wasn’t until the mid 1970s that China began exporting ships. In 1982 China was ranked just 16th in ship exports. Even after China became one of the world’s major shipbuilders in the 1990s (ranking 3rd behind Japan and Korea), it was still only producing a single-digit percentage of total commercial shipping tonnage. China finally surpassed Japan and Korea in tonnage produced in 2009 and 2010, respectively.2

Despite a collapse in the worldwide shipbuilding market following the Global Financial Crisis, China has since continued to expand its dominance. While it’s produced all kinds of ships over its history, for the most part its ship exports have consisted mostly of relatively simple ships like tankers and bulk carriers.3 More specialized, complex ships like liquified natural gas (LNG) carriers and cruise ships historically remained the purview of producers like South Korea, Germany, and Italy. But as China’s shipbuilding capabilities have grown, it has encroached into these areas as well. China now has 34% of the world orderbook for LNG, including an enormous order for 18 LNG carriers from Qatar which was the largest shipbuilding order in history. China’s first domestically-produced cruise ship, the Adora Magic City, first sailed in 2024.

Shipbuilding after the birth of PRC

Prior to the formation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, China was a minor player in the global shipbuilding industry.4 Between 1865 and 1949 China only built around 500,000 deadweight tons of steel ships (roughly the capacity of 46 Liberty Ships, or about a half a Liberty Ship per year). This is about 1% of the shipping tonnage the US produced during WWII, and about 20% of what a single large shipyard will produce in a year today. And following the end of the Chinese Civil War, what little shipbuilding capabilities China had were hollowed out: As the Nationalists evacuated to Taiwan, they stripped the largest shipyards of equipment, and “dynamited what remained.” In 1949 China’s largest shipyards lay in ruins, and it had fewer than 1000 shipbuilding machine tools and less than 10,000 trained shipyard workers.5

But a capable shipbuilding industry was valuable for China, both for naval purposes and for the transportation of goods. Most of China’s population was concentrated on the coasts (making coastal cargo trade important), and while road and rail networks were sparse (China had less than 5000 miles of usable rail network in 1949), large rivers allowed access to China’s interior by ship. Additionally, large oceangoing ships were in short supply following the end of the civil war, as were sailors to sail them. As the Nationalists evacuated for Taiwan, much of China’s oceangoing fleet went with them, and in 1950 China had just 77 large merchant ships (ships which carry passengers or cargo), many of which were so damaged they couldn’t move under their own power. Most Chinese waterborne trade was carried via hundreds of thousands of traditional Chinese “junks”: small, wooden, sail-powered vessels. Following the end of the war, China began to repair the damaged ships that had been left behind, buy ships abroad, and build its own ships.

China’s early post-war shipbuilding efforts were buoyed by assistance from the Soviet Union. In 1950, the two countries signed the “Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Aid,” and in 1953, they signed and a naval agreement in which the Soviets promised financial support and technical assistance for shipbuilding and shipyard redevelopment. Dalian Shipyard, originally built by the Russians in 1898, was also returned to China in 1955. The Soviets helped turn ship repair facilities into shipyards at cities like Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Tianjin. They also helped establish ship research and design groups (such as the Shanghai Institute of Shipbuilding, modeled after the Leningrad Institute for Shipbuilding).

Chinese shipbuilding progressed slowly in the 1950s and 1960s, and most efforts were focused on naval vessel construction. Following the war, China didn’t build its first steel cargo ship until 1955, and by 1960 it was only building around 10 mostly small cargo ships per year. What little progress there was stalled following the Sino-Soviet split in 1960, and the withdrawal of Soviet shipbuilding assistance and Soviet-built ship components. (The Soviets had apparently in large part been operating the Chinese shipyards.) China’s rate of ship construction fell from 10 ships in 1960 to just two ships in 1961, one ship in 1962, and zero ships in 1963; before picking back up to five ships per year. Most ships that were produced were “obsolete Soviet designs still on hand from previous years”. China’s leadership in the early 1960s seemed to have little interest in a strong shipbuilding industry. Liu Shaoqi, then Vice Chairman of the CCP, allegedly stated that “it’s better to buy ships than build ships” and that shipbuilding that was done should be limited to just the ships, not the engines.

Which isn’t to say that China made no efforts to improve its shipbuilding industry during this time. China consolidated shipbuilding efforts under the Sixth Ministry of Machine Building in 1963, and sent teams to Western and Eastern European shipyards to learn modern principles of shipbuilding shipyard design. But these efforts mostly focused on naval construction, and building merchant ships remained a challenge. The “Dongfeng” a 11,400 dwt cargo ship celebrated as being of Chinese design and built entirely with Chinese components, had to wait six years after its 1960 launching due to a lack of engines. Shipbuilding facilities appear to have been small and/or scarce. In one case, a 5,000 dwt ship was built on a beach due to the lack of a proper berth. And while Japan was building 100,000+ dwt ships using 300+ ton gantry cranes, Chinese yards often struggled to even build 20,000 dwt ships: In his 1991 study of the shipbuilding industry, Daniel Todd relays a story of a Shanghai shipyard that was forced to figure out how to assemble a 20,000 dwt cargo ship in facilities meant for just 3,000 dwt ships:

Fit for working on only at low tide, the ship’s rear ‘section was assembled upside down. There was no crane in Shanghai big enough to turn it right-side up. The workers sealed it, pushed it into the river, and there with the water taking most of the weight, used a borrowed crane to turn it over.’

Shipbuilding worsened following the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. The purging of managers and technical experts, along with Mao’s “Third Front” plan to relocate defense industries to China’s interior, hampered industrial development of all kinds, including shipbuilding — though oceangoing shipbuilding was less affected due to its need for deep water access. Shipyards became “paralyzed by political extremism,” and the Sixth Ministry which oversaw shipbuilding was split into rival factions, bringing shipbuilding to a halt at several yards until the navy intervened. The ships produced were of questionable quality, and a focus on metrics like total tonnage produced resulted in ships that were too large for most of China’s ports, and without proper cargo handling equipment. China continued to expand its merchant fleet during this period, but did so primarily by importing ships, instead of building them.

The shipbuilding industry remained enmeshed in political struggles in the 1970s: Factions battled over whether China’s merchant fleet should be expanded by buying ships (favored by the “rationalists”) or building them (favored by the “radicals”). Ship output rose and fell, depending on which faction was in power.6 This continued until Mao’s death in 1976, when the radical faction was purged and emphasis shifted from shipbuilding to buying yet again.

As China’s state-owned shipping companies had begun to favor foreign over domestic shipbuilders, China’s shipbuilding industry took tentative steps into the international market and building ships for export. China’s first export orders for small ships (less than 5000 dwt) were booked in 1975, and for larger ships in 1977. To improve its shipbuilding capabilities following the end of the Cultural Revolution as part of the broader “reform and opening up,” China solicited foreign assistance to help upgrade its shipyards, which were roughly at the level of development they had been when the Soviets left in the early 1960s. Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (then one of the world’s largest shipbuilders) was contracted to help modernize China’s largest shipyard at Jiangnan, and the UK’s British Shipbuilders and A&P Appledore were brought in to help upgrade shipyards at Dalian and Guangdong. Via these agreements the infrastructure and layout of the shipyards was upgraded, modern shipbuilding technology was brought in, and Chinese shipyard workers were given extensive training. In 1980 China also formed its first (but far from its last) shipbuilding joint venture via YK Pao’s Hong Kong-based Worldwide Shipping, then one of the largest shipping companies in the world. The new venture, named International United Shipping and Investment Company, would contract for ships to be built in Shanghai, using modern shipbuilding technology.

As it upgraded its shipyard facilities with foreign assistance, China also began to obtain licenses to manufacture foreign ship technology. Starting in the late 1970s, China began local production and assembly of foreign-designed ship components, such as marine diesel engines, electrical generators, deck cranes, and steering machinery. (Chinese producers often struggled to manufacture these components at the required level of quality, and much of this work was simply final assembly using foreign-produced parts.) The late 1970s and early 1980s was also when foreign certification societies, like Lloyd’s Register, began overseeing Chinese ship construction and certifying Chinese ships. Without these certifications, ships would have great difficulty getting insured, making ship owners very reluctant to buy them. By 1983, 90% of ships built in China for export were certified by Lloyd’s.

By the end of the 1970s, China had exported a handful of ships and was offering to export ships priced 5-15% cheaper than other producers. Despite the low quality and outdated technology of Chinese ships, Chinese shipyards had accumulated an orderbook for 900,000 deadweight tons for export by 1982 — mostly bulk carriers, oil tankers, and other similarly simple ships — more than the capacity of all existing Chinese shipyards. And while for most of its history most of China’s shipbuilding was for naval vessels, by 1981 more than 60% of shipbuilding was for civilian cargo ships.

Shipbuilding in post-reform China

By the early 1980s, China was finding some success in the ship export market, and had substantially developed its shipbuilding industry. A 1976 CIA study noted that ““the past decade has shown a dramatic increase in China’s shipbuilding capabilities”. But China’s shipbuilding industry was still far behind international leaders like Japan and Korea. China’s ship and shipyard technology was out of date, ship quality was low, and deliveries were often late. In an apparent holdover of Mao’s emphasis on self-reliance, individual shipyards still tried to produce as much as they could in-house, including shipbuilding equipment, which had created a highly fragmented industry with few economies of scale. And even with the empahsis on in-house production, low technical capabilities meant that most critical ship components had to be imported from abroad. Responsibility for shipbuilding was similarly fragmented among various ministries, agencies, and local governments. And while the industry had begun to produce ships for export, China placed little emphasis on tailoring production to meet market demands: shipyards simply sold the same sorts of ships that they were producing for domestic purposes.

But a period of great reform to China’s shipbuilding industry began in 1982. That year, in an effort to improve the industry’s performance, China consolidated nearly all shipbuilding efforts into a single state-owned enterprise, China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC). CSSC oversaw 26 shipyards, 66 factories, 33 R&D units, 3 universities and marine schools, and a workforce of roughly 300,000.

The original goal of CSSC was simply to more effectively carry out China’s existing shipbuilding policy: Build ships primarily for the domestic market while selling some similar ships for export. But a downturn in the global ship market in the early 1980s (coming on the heels of a much larger downturn from the industry’s 1970s peak) left shipbuilders around the world with huge amounts of excess capacity and desperate for new orders. From 1981 to 1982 the price for new ships declined by more than 40% on average. Ships were so cheap, and offered on such favorable terms, that it was cheaper for China’s primary shipping enterprise, China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO), to import ships than buy them from CSSC. In spite of the efforts made to improve the industry, shipbuilding remained a low priority for China’s top leadership, and COSCO was under no pressure to purchase domestically-produced ships. In 1982 and 1983 more than 90% of COSCO’s ship orders went to foreign shipyards. At the same time, the weak shipbuilding market caused CSSC’s export orders to dry up: new orders fell from more than 300,000 dwt in 1981 to less than 100,000 in 1982.

Unable to rely on a captive domestic market, CSSC was forced to try and make its export offerings more competitive to keep its shipyards occupied (as a state corporation for a communist country, there was no risk that CSSC would go out of business, but apparently due to political considerations it couldn’t simply allow its shipyards to sit idle). However, the sorts of ships it had traditionally focused on building – relatively simple bulk carriers and tankers – were in low demand in the cutthroat shipbuilding market of the early 1980s. China’s shipyards thus began to hunt for orders for any type of ship at all, including more advanced ships that they had traditionally eschewed such refrigerated containerships, roll-on/roll-off (ro-ro) car carriers, and chemical carriers. In the mid 1980s China secured orders for two 69,000 dwt chemical carriers and a 125,000 dwt shuttle tanker7 from Norwegian shipowners, as well as two small containerships and two ro-ro ships from the Japanese.

While traditionally China’s shipyards had sought to maximize domestically-produced components and to minimize foreign involvement in ship production, CSSC found itself relaxing these requirements in its quest to fill its order books. The Norwegian ships were Norwegian-designed, used equipment and materials imported from Europe, and subcontracted some of the work to Norwegian companies. The containerships for Japan similarly were built with imported equipment and steel plate from Japan. One shipowner in the 1980s claimed that his Chinese-built ships were simply assembled in China using Japanese-produced parts.

In an effort to make its offerings more competitive and fill its empty shipyards, CSSC also undertook other improvements in its shipbuilding operations. At the time, ship construction times were long and unpredictable, due in part to bureaucratic delays in decision-making and material procurement. A mid-1980s shipbuilding study that compared lead times in a Chinese and Japanese shipyard found that the Chinese yard required up to six months more time to procure material. In one case, a refrigerated containership built for a German customer was delivered a year late because of difficulties obtaining the steel:

At first, steel was to be imported from Japan, until the relevant national foreign trade corporation, China National Metals and Minerals Import and Export Corporation, mysteriously refused Hudong’s request. Subsequent plans to obtain the steel domestically were nixed when the shipment, coming from the inland port of Wuhan, was physically stranded in river traffic and could not be transported in time. When CSSC tried again, this time successfully, to import from Japan, the effort was still stymied, in this instance by a requirement that imports of products similar to those made in China be transported by Chinese ships. Due to congestion at Tianjin – hardly the most logical port for receiving goods destined for a shipyard in Shanghai – the ship carrying the Japanese steel had to berth outside the port, further delaying delivery. When the steel finally arrived at the yard, 18 months had already elapsed in the 25-month delivery period stipulated in the contract.

But CSSC’s construction times improved, as individual shipyards gained more autonomy in their operations: Shipyards gradually gained the ability to negotiate individually with foreign shipowners, equipment manufacturers, consultants, and classification societies. They were given more leeway to use foreign-produced ship designs, to make their own equipment and material purchases, and exercise more managerial control over their operations. Steel plate, for instance, had previously only been distributed twice a year from the Ministry of Metallurgy, forcing yards to plan very far in advance and resulting in frequent steel shortages and delays. But by the mid-1980s, yards were being given more control over acquiring materials outside of set schedules. Contracts began to be used to manage responsibilities between different organizations within CSSC, and bonus systems were implemented to motivate workers. Slowly, CSSC started to become more of a coordinator of somewhat (but only somewhat) independent shipyard companies, rather than a single monolithic enterprise. As a result of these and other improvements, ship delivery times improved. CSSC’s large shipyard at Jiangnan halved its delivery times over the course of the 1980s, and by the end of the decade some Chinese yards were actually delivering ships early.

CSSC also worked to improve its capabilities in other ways. It continued to license foreign ship technology — by 1986 it had signed over 200 contracts for licensed manufacture, co-production, and other similar arrangements — while also improving its manufacturing capabilities so more components could be produced domestically rather than assembled from foreign-produced parts. It improved its financing offerings for ship buyers, offering credit terms more in line with those offered by foreign builders. It upgraded facilities at various shipyards, restructuring and consolidating their operations and installing more modern production machinery. While at the beginning of the '80s shipyards strived to be autarkic, vertically-integrated operations that could produce any type of ship, over the decade shipyards began to specialize: some yards focused on tankers, some on containerships, and so on. Yards experimented with new management practices and invested much more in management training.

China’s shipbuilding industry remained behind countries like Korea and Japan in the 1980s. Shipbuilding facilities were small compared to the largest foreign yards: China’s largest drydock (a flat, floodable basin on which ships are built) in 1985 could produce ships up to 100,000 dwt, while in Japan the largest drydocks could produce ships ten times that size. China wouldn’t complete a 250,000 dwt drydock, allowing it to build the very largest crude oil tankers, until the mid-1990s. Shipyard crane capacity was similarly limited, and while the block method of construction had been adopted by Chinese yards (it’s unclear exactly when, but at least by 1982), blocks were smaller and less fully outfitted compared to the most modern foreign yards, and were wastefully moved around yards far more often. China’s shipyard facilities in the 1980s were described by visitors as operating on the level of 1950s or 1960s US yards. In some cases unreliable electrical grids forced shipyards to supply power via their own generators. Shipyards were staffed with far too few engineers, and low labor productivity meant that yards employed a very large number of blue collar workers in comparison to their output.

And despite China’s efforts at technological transfer, the fraction of domestically-produced components in Chinese ships remained “disappointingly low”; even things like ship steel mostly had to be imported because Chinese steel wasn’t good enough. Designs and components were often unstandardized, and ships were frequently built based on the idiosyncrasies of whatever engineer happened to be working on the project. Ship quality had improved, but slowly, and many shipowners remained dubious. Delivery times and labor efficiency were still far behind what Korea and Japan were capable of. And while Chinese shipyards were offering prices well below international competitors, prices were set based on what would win the yard orders without regards to actual production costs, and CSSC lost huge amounts of money on many ships that were underbid. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that Chinese shipyards began to factor profit and loss into their operations.

But while China’s shipbuilding industry was still behind the world leaders, CSSC’s shifting emphasis towards exports and transforming its operations to meet the needs of the market gradually bore fruit. By the late 1980s CSSC was producing half of its ships for export, up from 1/3rd in 1982. By 1991 China had exported ships to 30 different countries, and by 1992 it had become the third largest commercial shipbuilder in the world, up from 16th in 1982.

Shipbuilding in the 1990s

China’s shipbuilding industry continued to slowly improve in the 1990s. Shipbuilders became increasingly cost-conscious, as CSSC headquarters had begun to more closely monitor shipyard bids to shipowners and reject any that they believed couldn’t be achieved profitably. Departments within shipyards began to sign contracts with each other that included delivery time and cost targets, and workers could earn bonuses by meeting them. Chinese shipyards began to walk away from bids if the price buyers demanded was too low. By 1994 maritime publication Lloyd’s List reported that “indifference to price is a thing of the past in China”, and by the mid-1990s shipbuilding was one of China’s most competitive export industries. In 1996, 85% of new merchant ships in China were built for export.

During the 1990s China continued its efforts to acquire ship and shipbuilding technology by way of manufacturing licenses, joint ventures, and technology transfer agreements. China signed agreements with Japanese and European shipyards for the transfer of technologies like CAD/CAM software, metal cutting techniques, gearboxes, and diesel and gas turbine engines. By the early 2000s nearly every major marine engine manufacturer had established a manufacturing facility in China, and Chinese shipyards had widely adopted CAD/CAM ship design software (which had been rarely used in the early 1990s). Hundreds of Chinese shipyard workers were trained in Japanese shipyards, and Chinese yards gained continued exposure to foreign design practices by producing foreign-designed ships, inviting foreign consultants to lecture in China, and partnering with foreign ship design firms. This training, information exchange, and technology transfer all helped improve China’s shipyard operations. It enabled advancements like more efficient hull blocks, which minimized material use by intelligently locating joints, and it improved labor productivity by making greater use of pre-outfitting (installing systems on hull blocks before they’re attached to the ship).

Chinese shipyards also expanded their shipbuilding capacity in the 1990s. In 1995, the shipyard at Dalian completed a 250,000 dwt-capacity drydock, the first dock in the country capable of building Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs). Over the next 10 years, China built 8 more VLCC-capable drydocks, and had another four in the planning stages. China’s total shipbuilding capacity in 1982 was 800,000 dwt annually. By 1997 it had reached 2.5 million dwt, and investments were being made to increase that to 3.5 million dwt.

China also took its next tentative steps with shipyard joint ventures in the 1990s. In 1991, German shipping company Schierack Beteiligungs was so impressed with China’s delivery of two liquified petroleum gas (LPG) carriers that it established a joint shipyard with CSSC, Shanghai Edward Shipbuilding, to build more of them. And in 1994, the Yantai Raffles shipyard, a joint venture between two Chinese companies and Singapore’s Brian Chang Group, began operations.8 (Yantai Raffles is notable for being 100% foreign owned, a rare occurrence for Chinese joint ventures, and for setting records for the world’s largest revolving pedestal crane and the most weight ever lifted by a crane.)

China’s shipbuilding industry was badly shaken following the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and the huge decline in new ship orders that followed. As a result, China took steps to try and further improve the industry’s operations and efficiency. CSSC slashed an estimated 1/3rd of its labor force, and to further encourage competition in 1999 the company was split into two: CSSC and China Shipbuilding Industrial Corporation, or CSIC. That same year, the government began to encourage shipyards to pursue joint ventures with foreign shipyards as a way to further acquire foreign ship and shipyard technology. Foreign operators were limited to 49% ownership (a requirement that was temporarily relaxed in 2001, then reinstated in 2006)9, and agreements included “mandatory provisions ensuring foreign technology transfer into Chinese shipyards”. One such joint venture was NACKS, a shipbuilding joint venture between China’s COSCO and Japan’s Kawasaki Heavy Industries, which became one of China’s largest shipyards. Between 1999 and 2008, NACKS constructed more than 7% of all ship tonnage built in China.

By the end of the 1990s, the status of China’s shipbuilding industry was not all that different from the end of the 1980s. It remained a distant third behind Korea and Japan in terms of output. At the end of 1999, China’s orderbook was less than 1/10th the size of Japan’s or Korea’s, and it had just 3% of total international orders. Of the 40 largest shipyards in the world by number of orders, China had just 2 (Dalian at #18 and Hudong at #22).

While China’s shipbuilding industry had made significant progress in improving its operations during the 1990s (as it had in the 1980s), China’s shipyards were still inferior to the best foreign yards in terms of efficiency, technological capabilities, and ship quality. Delivery times and quality had both improved, but they were still somewhat inconsistent, and Chinese yards were still “fairly well known” for delivering ships late and/or or poorly built: Foreign shipowners would send large numbers of advisors to Chinese yards to try and ensure the ships were built properly, but as late as 2006 Chinese yards were building ships that had to be scuttled after being rejected by the buyer for being unseaworthy. A substantial volume of ship steel (~15%) and ship components (~40%) still needed to be imported from abroad, and most ship engines were either imported or built in China from licensed foreign designs. Outside analyses of Chinese shipyards found that they often had trouble taking maximum advantage of the latest technology if they had it (and they often didn’t: In the 1990s, the majority of Chinese shipyards were estimated to have 1980s-level technology) and that Chinese yards still may not have known what their true costs of production were. Despite its efforts to build more advanced, complex ships China still had a reputation for being a cheap builder of the simplest ships, a status reflected in its orderbook. Chinese shipyards still had a sizable labor cost advantage compared to yards in Korea and Japan, but much of this advantage was offset by its low productivity. What’s more, productivity was improving very slowly as costs were rising, and there was concern that the industry was losing price and technological ground to foreign yards.

Chinese shipyard competitiveness circa 2003, via Koenig 2003.

By the new millennium, China’s shipbuilding industry had progressed significantly, but it remained in a lower league than Japan and Korea, who continued to dominate world ship production.

Shipbuilding in the 21st century

In the year 2000, China’s Party Central Committee (the central governing body of China) and the State Council (roughly equivalent to the cabinet or executive branch) identified shipbuilding as a key industry for development. In 2002, Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji stated that China should become the world’s foremost shipbuilder, and the government set a target for the country to become the world’s biggest shipbuilder by 2015. The next year, China released its National Marine Economic Development Plan, which proposed building several large shipbuilding bases around the country. China’s 11th five-year economic plan, released at the end of 2005, identified shipbuilding as a strategic industry and announced goals for annual shipbuilding tonnage: 15 million dwt by 2010 and 22 million by 2015. By the time this plan was released, China’s shipbuilding output had already been steadily increasing, buoyed by an upswing in the international shipbuilding market (worldwide shipbuilding output rose more than 50% between 2000 and 2005): China’s shipbuilding output was nearly 10 million dwt in 2005, up from just 2.5 million dwt in 2000.

Following these new policy priorities, state investment poured into the shipbuilding sector. It’s estimated that the government spent $90 billion subsidizing the shipbuilding industry between 2006 and 2013, contributing an estimated 15-20% of the cost of each new ship. Between 2004 and 2007, annual investment in Chinese shipyards rose by a factor of seven. Dozens of new shipyards began construction, including huge sites at Changxing Island, Longxue Island, and Bohai. In some cases, entire shipyards were relocated to new facilities: Jiangnan shipyard, historically one of China’s largest shipyards, was moved to Changxing Island to clear room for the Shanghai Expo 2010. These new shipyards were largely “greenfield” sites with plenty of space and huge drydocks, including a 1,000,000 dwt capacity dock at Yantai. They were designed for efficient material flows and incorporated modern shipbuilding technology.

Chinese shipyard investment, via Barwick et al. 2019.

Much of this investment went into CSSC and CSIC-operated yards, but the industry also expanded outside of these two state-owned giants. Scores of smaller yards operating outside the auspices of CSSC and CSIC cropped up, many of them simple “beach” yards with little in the way of infrastructure or government oversight. And many large privately owned shipyards, operated by both foreign and local companies, were built as well. By 2012, only 8 of the 20 largest shipyards in China were operated by CSSC or CSIC.

Prior to these initiatives, China has already been capturing a greater share of the world shipbuilding market: By 2005, it had reached nearly 14% of new deliveries, and 16% of the global orderbook (up from 5% and 9% in 2000). But the huge amount of investment in the sector threw gasoline on the fire: China’s orderbook surpassed Japan’s in 2007. It surpassed Korea’s in 2009. China met its goal of producing 15m dwt by 2010 in 2007, and met its goal of producing 22m dwt by 2015 in 2009. In 2010, China produced more ships (whether by number of ships, deadweight tons, or gross tons) than any other country in the world, and in 2012 it produced roughly as much tonnage as the entire world had in 2002.

As China expanded its shipbuilding infrastructure and captured a larger share of the global market, it continued its efforts to acquire foreign shipbuilding technology through partnerships and joint ventures with Japanese, Korean, and European firms. In 2006, when reverting the rules for foreign investment to limit foreign ownership of shipyards to 49%, China also required that foreign partners set up technological transfer centers to transfer expertise to local partners. In 2009, an executive at CSSC published an article stating that Chinese shipbuilders should focus on “introducing, digesting, absorbing, and re-innovating” foreign technology. It apparently became common for Japanese and Korean engineers to offer consulting services to China and for Chinese shipyards to hire retired Korean engineers. It’s estimated that following the downturn of Korea’s shipbuilding industry in the late 2010s, roughly 2000 former shipyard workers left Korea for China:

China must have thought, ‘This is the moment.’ They recruited many engineers, and they must have been after things like the design drawings that they kept privately. Chinese shipbuilding companies tried to recruit Korean engineers by offering them ‘annual salary of 300 million won [~$216,000 USD], 2-3 year contracts’ as if it were a formula. They just sucked up the juice and sent them away when the 2-3 year contracts were up.

China’s desire to absorb their expertise did little to dissuade foreign firms from entering China, enticed by China’s large market and low costs of labor. Qingdao Hyundai Shipbuilding, a joint venture with Korea’s Hyundai, was founded in 2005, and STX Dalian, a venture of Korea’s STX group, began operations in 2006. Kawasaki’s joint shipbuilding venture NACKS founded another joint shipbuilding operation, DACOS, in 2007. In 2005 alone, China’s shipbuilding industry filed 104 proposals for foreign investments or joint ventures. Foreign joint ventures in China’s shipbuilding industry continue to be widely used today, and new ventures continue to pop up all the time.

Shipbuilding since the financial crisis

The huge expansion of China’s shipbuilding industry was derailed by the 2008 global financial crisis. Orders for new ships collapsed worldwide, and ship prices fell by roughly 50% (depending on the ship). Only after Covid has the shipbuilding industry shown signs of bouncing back: Orderbooks have risen 65% in the last 4 years, but orders and deliveries are still down from the pre-crisis peak.

China was hit especially hard by the industry slowdown. Much of its expansion in capacity had come by way of building numerous small, inefficient shipyards poorly equipped to weather a major decline in the global shipbuilding market. By 2010, China was only using 75% of its shipyard capacity, and by 2015, that had fallen to 50%. Many shipyards went bankrupt or ceased operations. Rongsheng Heavy Industries, previously the largest privately-owned shipbuilder in China, shuttered its operations in 2014 10. STX Dalian declared bankruptcy the same year. Across the country, shipyard facilities sat idle, and the formation of new shipyards declined precipitously.

As a result of its struggles, the Chinese government took steps to shore up the shipbuilding industry. It created a scrap and build policy to encourage shipowners to dispose of older ships in favor of new ships. It rolled out extremely attractive financing options, allowing shipowners to buy ships with as little as 2% down payment.11 And it encouraged shipyards to merge and consolidate in order to become stronger and more internationally competitive. Due to the ebb in merchant ship orders, this consolidation often took the form of combining shipyards that had civilian orders with shipyards that had military orders, so the financial strength of the latter could support the former. (One such consolidation was CSIC and CSSC, which began to re-merge in 2019 following years of discussion.) But only the largest and most productive shipyards (as well as shipyards that produced military vessels) were flagged as eligible for support, and between 2010 and 2019, the number of active shipyards in China declined by 70%. Despite this consolidation, even today China’s industry remains comparatively fragmented compared to Korea. While China has a large fraction of the world’s largest shipyards, and most of the world orderbook by capacity, the largest shipyards in the world by maximum output remain Korean.12

In relative terms, China’s shipbuilding industry managed to stay on top in spite of its struggles. China remained the world’s largest shipbuilder by output from 2010 to 2014, and while Korea regained the top spot in 2015 and 2016, China has held on to first place since 2017.13 Still, China’s shipbuilding industry faced perennial challenges throughout its expansion: While Chinese yards maintained a labor cost advantage compared to Japan and Korea, it was still less labor efficient in terms of output per man-hour (as well as in terms of output per square meter of shipyard) in the 2010s.14 Productivity improved slowly due to work being spread across a comparatively large number of shipyards, which hampered learning curve effects. China still had comparatively few engineering personnel in shipyards compared to Korea or Japan, and such personnel were mostly allocated to naval rather than commercial work. Shipyard turnover was high, and Chinese ships still took longer to build than Korean and Japanese ships. They were also still considered to have worse quality, being noisier, dirtier, and less fuel efficient than Japanese or Korean ships. The result was that Chinese ships sold at a discount compared to Korean and Japanese vessels, and they maintained much less of their value in the secondary market. Experts estimated that for many complex types of ships, China was still several years behind the world leaders.

China also continued to struggle to produce many of the sub-components and materials needed for shipbuilding. While China became apt at building marine engines (based on licensed designs), it still needed to import many components including electrical equipment, navigation equipment, cabin outfitting equipment, and specialty steels (including the steel used for the exterior hull). Estimates in the mid-2010s pegged China’s level of domestic production for components at 55-60%, compared to 80-90% in Korea and Japan. A 2013 CSIC report noted that while the company excelled at “‘building the empty shells,’ we basically use foreign products inside the ships, including the propulsion system, the communication system and the navigation system with high added value and high technical contents.” And while China had successfully built complex vessels like LNG carriers15 (which need to be built to strict tolerances to ensure the liquified gas stays insulated and cold), it purportedly struggled to build them, and China’s share of the LNG market was in the single digits as late as 2021. Well into the 2010s, China’s bread and butter remained simpler ships like tankers and bulk carriers.16

But as it has since its inception, China’s shipbuilding industry has continued to march forward. China’s overall share of the world orderbook rose from 40% in 2010 to 57% at the end of 2024. It has now captured 30% of the LNG market, 45% of the LPG market, and 70% of the market for large container ships. In 2024, China secured 75% of new ship orders. It’s continued to partner with foreign firms across the shipbuilding value chain, and simultaneously increase its quality and productivity: one expert recently stated that “the quality gap has closed a lot over the last 15 years or so,” with the quality being “in many instances as good as you’d get elsewhere.” China still lags in some areas (like building cruise ships), but it seems motivated to catch up there as well.

Conclusion

If you survey the arc of the development of China’s shipbuilding industry, you’ll see a trend of continuous (if sometimes plodding) progress, with the occasional interruption and reversion. After most 10-year periods, you could look back on the previous decade and see substantial improvement in China’s shipbuilding capabilities: China went from having virtually no shipbuilding industry at all to producing its first vessels in the 1950s, entering the export market in the 1970s, becoming an increasingly successful player in the 1980s and 1990s, and becoming the world’s largest shipbuilder in the 2000s.

But you could similarly examine where China’s industry stood at most points in time and see an industry that was still behind many of its competitors. Until very recently China struggled to build ships that were as high quality or as complex as those from other countries. Even today, as the undisputed biggest shipbuilder in the world, it seems like China still lags in producing the most complex ships, in shipyard productivity, and in producing various marine components (most engines in Chinese ships, for instance, are still based on foreign designs) — though it wouldn’t surprise me if this gap continues to shrink.

What’s notable to me isn’t that China became a major shipbuilding country. Most low-labor cost countries that have tried have been able to carve out a share of the world market, at least for a time. Japan and Korea are the obvious examples, but countries like Brazil, Poland, Yugoslavia and Taiwan also had major shipbuilding industries that were developed following WWII.

Instead, what’s notable is how long it took China to become a major player. Compared to Korea, China’s shipbuilding industry seems to have advanced slowly. Like China, Korea had little shipbuilding capability following the end of WWII (in 1962 only 8% of South Korea’s shipping tonnage was steel ships), and Korea didn’t begin exporting ships until the 1970s. But in less than a decade, Korea’s Hyundai emerged from no previous shipbuilding experience to become the largest shipbuilder in the world. By 1984, Korea had captured 17% of the global ship orderbook, and by the end of the 1980s, Korea had the world’s largest orderbook. China, on the other hand, didn’t reach a similar share of world orders until 2005, and it didn’t have the world’s largest orderbook until 2010.

(Compared to Japan, which became the world’s largest shipbuilder less than a decade after it began building up its industry following WWII, China is slower still, but this is less of a fair comparison since Japan entered the post-war era as a much more capable shipbuilder.)

While Korea entered shipbuilding in the 1970s with a full-throated desire to become a major shipbuilder, as late as the early 1990s China was apparently “not thoroughly convinced of [shipbuilding’s] usefulness.” Progress accelerated when China’s government fully embraced shipbuilding in the late 2000s, though one wonders how successful this effort would have been without the previous three decades of export experience.

Since the end of WWII, we’ve seen a regular emergence of new major players in the shipbuilding market. These countries almost always capture market share by leveraging their low costs of production (especially labor) and are often able clamber up the worldwide rankings following a major industry disruption. Japan displaced the UK as the largest shipbuilder in the world following WWII and the invention of modern shipbuilding methods; Korea emerged as a major shipbuilder following the collapse of the shipbuilding market in the late 1970s, eventually muscling Japan out of the top spot. China in turn displaced Korea following the huge expansion, then contraction, of its shipbuilding industry in the 2000s and early 2010s. It remains to be seen if a similar pattern will befall China (perhaps by a country like Vietnam, whose orderbook quadrupled between 2020 and 2024), or if China will be more successful at maintaining a hold over the industry.

There are several measures of ship capacity.

Deadweight tons (dwt) is the total amount of weight a ship can carry.
Displacement tons is the weight of the ship itself.
Gross tons (GT) is a measure of internal ship volume.
Compensated gross tons (CGT) is similar to Gross Tons but with an adjustment to try and correct for the fact that some ships are more complex to build than other types. It's a measure of effort it takes to build a ship, and is used to compare the output of different shipyards (or different countries) that might be producing very different types of ships.

Korea retook the lead in 2015 and again in 2016 on compensated gross tonnage produced, but since 2017 China has remained in the #1 spot.

Relative complexity of different ship types:

China did manage to produce an all-welded cargo ship in 1947, prior to Japanese yards performing similar feats.

10,000 workers is less than what a single US WWII shipyard employed. Kaiser’s Swan Island Facility employed more than 30,000.

Even when focus shifted to building, China’s lack of shipbuilding capacity meant that most additions to China’s merchant fleet were still imports.

Shuttle tankers transport oil from offshore oil fields.

Chinese partner companies were China National Petroleum Company and Yantai City Mechanical Industrial Company.

Yantai Raffles, which was 100% foreign owned, was grandfathered in under the old rules.

In part because, despite its state of the art shipyard, it struggled to build actual ships.

Thanks to this program, between 2005 and 2015 European Banks’ share of ship financing fell from 70% to 30%. Over the same period Chinese banks rose from 2% to 18%.

Though some of these shipyards are adjacent to each other. Geographically, the largest shipbuilding facility in the world is likely Changxing Island.

Measured by CGT.

Though this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you have very cheap labor, it may not make sense to displace that labor with comparatively more expensive labor-saving technology.

China delivered its first LNG carrier in 2007.

It’s important to note that this emphasis on tankers and bulkers is to some extent a reflection of global demand for ships. China’s 2015 orderbook is not all that different from the world orderbook of 2015, though China has a lower proportion of complex ships.