The U.S. shipbuilding industry is shrinking. Its labor unions and some politicians are blaming China for it and trying to resort to protectionist measures to save it.

However, this is not the right path to revive the U.S. shipbuilding industry but a wrong way that will only lead to its further decline.

In fact, the decline of the U.S. shipbuilding industry started long before the rise of China's shipbuilding industry.

Even in its better days in the 1970s, the U.S. shipbuilding industry accounted for less than five percent of the world's tonnage. By the 1980s, the figure had dropped to less than one percent of global production of commercial vessels, about the same number as it is today.

At that time, China's shipbuilding industry had just started to catch up. Even in 1999, China accounted for only about five percent of merchant shipping tonnage globally.

We can see from the timeline of U.S. decline in the global shipbuilding market that it has nothing to do with China's development of its own industry.

In fact, as many experts have pointed out, the decline is the result of many factors, including blatant protectionism, aging infrastructure, an insufficient number of skilled workers, and lack of competitiveness.

Even today, U.S. laws require that ships traveling between U.S. ports or on its internal waterways must be American made, owned, and operated.

Various studies show that the U.S. shipbuilding industry lost its competitive advantage many years ago due to overprotection.

On the other hand, the growth of China's shipbuilding industry is the result of Chinese companies' tech innovation and participation in market competition. It has also benefited from the country's fully-fledged industrial manufacturing system and vast domestic market.

Blaming China's rise for the U.S. decline in the shipbuilding industry is a lame excuse and won't do any good for the latter's improvement. What the U.S. should really do is not to hype the so-called external threat but look into its internal problems to find a viable path for going forward.

In today's world, a globalized shipbuilding industry is a critical lifeline of global trade. Resorting to protectionist measures will not save the U.S. shipbuilding industry but cause the opposite of what the U.S. wants, making its shipbuilding industry less competitive and disrupting the supply chain of the global shipbuilding industry.