Your timescale of 10-15 weeks is almost certainly true for any individual shipyard or steel plant, but we don't have the kind of cement production or bricklaying capacity or steel production to run all those replacement projects in parallel (and renovate their supporting infrastructure, which hasn't been properly maintained for between one and four decades), nevermind the political institutions to organise such an effort.
Let's be wildly optimistic and say that we have or can create sufficient slack in our industrial plant to re-build ten percent of the Chinese industrial capacity dedicated to exports in parallel. Let's further say that all replacement industrial capacity is immediately dedicated to this project, and that China's domestic industrial plant is roughly equal to the effort that would be mobilised for the reconstruction effort.
Under these wildly optimistic assumptions, it would still take seven to eight iterations, or between 1½ and 2½ years at 10 and 15 weeks per iteration, respectively, to replace the full productive power of China. During which time we would essentially be operating a wartime economy.
And this assumes that you put engineers in charge of the process, so it works as smoothly as can be reasonably expected from a human endeavour. With the crop of lawyers, economists and bookies currently holding the commanding heights of our industrial plant, you'd have to multiply by an idiot factor and add a run-around-like-headless-chickens-for-a-while term.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
On that timescale, it would be a great way to get out of the depression. After all, we're starting out from a recession so there is slack that could come online faster.
However, we've become more adept at liquidating plant so some of the redundant plan may already have been dismantled. By laying out pros and cons we risk inducing people to join the debate, and losing control of a process that only we fully understand. - Alan Greenspan
Another, though cruder and more risky, closing-down trick was arson. Burn the factory down (with consequent damage to machinery) and collect on the insurance (if you can). This one has gone out of favour as the insurance companies started looking seriously at what was going on.
