Natalie Winters

I think I would probably tack this on to what the $11.1 billion weapons package that was sent over to Taiwan to obviously anything going on

from a naval or sea perspective has to do with that area.

But I think that to really accurately depict the picture of how advanced China is in terms of the numbers of ships that they have, there's some really compelling statistics that I think the audience should hear.

If you do it by whole count, just for military vessels, China currently outnumbers there at around 370.

The United States is at around 290.

Obviously, the United States still goes with tonnage or displacement is the metric where we definitely trounce

the Chinese Communist Party when it comes to that.

But the sort of secret with all of those statistics is that that only counts military ships.

That doesn't count civilian ships, Coast Guard vessels, and we obviously know that China operates very heavily under military control.

And as you say, I'm a Beijing watcher.

It was not too long ago I was in Hong Kong and I was watching from the window of the hotel over in the harbor a ship rolling in where I turned.

I was like, is China invading?

Because it looked like a battleship that was just coming in to just an average area of Hong Kong.

And it was just a Coast Guard ship, point being that every single Chinese vessel that is created, it's not just that they're retrofitted, but they're created to have military standards.

So they can, at any point, they're essentially dormant military vessels, much like all of their state-owned enterprises and any company is there, can be flipped on and turned into a ship that is engaged in war.

And when you really broaden out the comparison of how many ships we have versus what China has, it really is more of an outpacing of about one U.S.

ship to every 20 Chinese ships.

And that number only expands when you start to add more and more, whether it's just, you know, surface combatants and then when you broaden it out to Coast Guard vessels.

And I also think that it's really quite concerning when you look at commercial shipping, too.

China accounts for 50% to 55% of global shipbuilding tonnage, where the United States is at 0.2%.