Radio Free Asia (RFA) on Saturday quoted reports from Chinese exporters and port officials who said traffic is visibly slowing down at China’s big port cities of Shanghai and Guangdong, while some factory production has virtually “ground to a halt.”
RFA saw considerable visual evidence to back up these accounts of China’s titanic export machine grinding to a halt, including warehouses stuffed with unshipped goods and stacks of shipping containers that were never loaded onto cargo vessels.
Chinese media reported two of Shanghai’s biggest shipping terminals “came to an abrupt halt” on Thursday after teeming with business 24 hours earlier. Exporters said China’s other major terminals have become comparably quiet.
The frenzy of activity in the middle of last week came after U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced freight that was in transit before April 9 would not be subject to the huge new 145% tariff imposed by President Trump.
Once that last-chance date passed, activity at China’s major ports slowed dramatically. Analysts said those ports would probably run at half capacity or less until the tariff war ends.
Peripheral industries in China’s port cities froze up as well. RFA quoted dejected Chinese businessmen who sensed “helplessness among the general public” and saw “signs of economic depression” as shops and restaurants in the port cities closed down.
Writing at the Maritime Executive on Sunday, Marine Corps logistics veteran and Booz Allen Hamilton associate Blaine Worthington suggested the U.S. should work with partner nations to break China’s stranglehold on shipping during the tariff slowdown.
Worthington noted the U.S. only has about 185 merchant ships at the moment, while China has 7,838. The U.S. is currently building 0.1 percent of the world’s ships, while China builds 50.7 percent. Similar shortages afflict allied nations.
Noting that it would take years to spin up new U.S. shipyards, Worthington suggested working with Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea to get more ships in the water quickly through a “multilateral maritime alliance,” a solution Australia has also been considering.