Cruise ship manufacturing is a high-tech, complex industry where development depends on coordination across stages and organizations. We advance the coordination literature by treating the supply chain, industry chain, and value chain as a complex system, and by linking cross-chain coordination to high-quality development in a way that is comparable to theoretical debates on capability building and productivity-oriented development. Empirically, we collect city-level panel data for ten Chinese cruise port cities from 2008 to 2023 and combine a coupling–coordination framework with a panel data qualitative comparative analysis (PD-QCA) to capture both coordination dynamics and configurational causality. Our results show substantial heterogeneity in coordination trajectories, which can be grouped into decline–recovery, high-level stability, and persistent decline/high-variability patterns. We also show that high coupling does not guarantee high-quality outcomes, which are jointly shaped by industrial foundations, high-end value creation, and innovation capacity. Moreover, we identify two main pathways: an anchoring pathway that depends on output capacity and resource inputs, and an optimizing pathway that mainly relies on investment intensity, demand-side output, and value efficiency, with cross-chain coordination acting as an enabling condition that helps improve cross-chain matching.