Spent some time looking around at some of China's roll-on/roll-off car carrier terminals - not their car ferry terminals, but the ones they use to load their pure car and truck carriers (mostly to export or import cars) on ships like this one:
Looking at a timeline of imagery, I was quite struck by how much these facilities have expanded in recent years. Here's a terminal in Shazai, on the Pearl River estuary near Hong Kong, shown in 2014 and 2019.
For a size comparison, here it is with the Pentagon's North Parking (a standard unit of measure for a big-a$$ parking lot).
Next is the RoRo terminal in Dalian, on the Yellow Sea, shown in 2012 and 2022.
And then Tianjin, on the Bohai/Yellow Sea, in 2011 and then 2017 and 2022.
And then finally one in Yantai, on the Yellow Sea, in 2013 and 2021.
To be clear, I'm not saying these facility expansions are for military reasons. Apparently China's car exports have been booming, doubling in 2021 and on a tear in 2022, with China now just behind Germany as the #3 car exporter, so this makes sense. just-auto.com
Nevertheless, if China needed to use facilities like these to load up these vessels with large quantities of some *other* sorts of vehicles in a hurry, they could be useful for that, too.
Would you like to know more? warontherocks.com
Interestingly, a good chunk of this boom in Chinese car exports is in electric vehicles. And the number one exporter of electric vehicles from China is...@Tesla. globaltimes.cn
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