New tendency of Chinese container port system: 1998–2010

Kunyou Pan,Youhui Cao,Hongyan Wei,Shuangbo Liang

doi:10.1007/s10708-013-9508-8

Abstract

By Hirschman–Herfindahl Index, the paper measures the spatial structure transformation of the Chinese container port system from the perspective of cargo flow in recent 13 years. It indicates that the spatial structure of container port system enters into “the challenge of the periphery” phase as a whole, the decentralization of container flow become the mainstream tendency of the spatial variation of China’s container port system; on the other hand, the spatial structure of container port system shows different characteristic in seven port regions, such as low-level equilibrium, single-gateway, multi-gateway and so on. It is a fact that multi-gateway port region of container port system has formed in Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta region. Economic and foreign trade development, government macro-control and policy guidance, challenge of the periphery, network expansion of the terminal operators and shipping liners are the main driving forces for these new phenomena.

Highlights

Literature reviews on port geographical research show that the study on port system development has been the hotspot of the Port Geography field
The rapid development of container throughput in the Yangtze River Delta region is another significant feature over the past decade of China’s container port system, its container throughput has increased nearly 14-fold from 1998 to 2010 with an annual average growth rate of up to 24.40 %, and it is higher than the national average growth rate of 8.1 percentage points, the share of the country’s container port system increased from 14.73 % to 32.89 %, which was close to the Pearl River Delta port range
Chinese container port system is divided into seven parts, which is different from three parts as Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta and Bohai Rim port systems

Summary

Introduction

Literature reviews on port geographical research show that the study on port system development has been the hotspot of the Port Geography field. Bohai Sea West Bank and Shandong Peninsula port ranges began to disperse under the background of high centralized levels of container flow, the decentralized speed of Liaodong Peninsula port range ranks first, the decentralization of southwest coastal port range is ongoing in the context of unobvious centralization for underdeveloped economic level. This space transformation can be reflected by market cumulative percentages of ports in Chinese coastland, the Share of top 1, top 3, top 5 and top 10 respectively decreased from 55, 74, 83 and 94 to 18, 46, 62 and 85 (Table 3).

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Findings

Conclusion