Search China Travel News:

China has witnessed rapid development of ports, harbors and water transportation over recent years, opening up new opportunities for international business, sources said currently.

Inoue Satoshi, general secretary of the International Association of Ports and Harbors (IAPH), said his organization is satisfied with the fast development of its 12 member ports in the country, with Shanghai becoming the world's fifth largest container port.

Satoshi is here attending the Marine Port China 2002 and Eighth International Exhibition on Ports, Waterway Construction, Shipping and Logistics.

Statistics show China shelled out 106.3 billion yuan (12.8 billion US dollars) for construction of ports, harbors and inland waterways in 1996-2000, greatly improving the water transportation capacity.

By the end of 2000, harbors along China's coast developed 651 berths capable of handling ships of 10,000 DWT (dead weight tonnage), of which 214 are able to handle ships of 30,000 DWT. The total handling capacity of harbors rose to 1.17 billion tons, with the specialized container berths handling 12 million TEUs (twenty feet equivalent units).

A network has been formed with three harbor areas at the core, namely, the Bohai Sea area in north China embracing Tianjin and Dalian harbors, the Yangtze River Delta area covering Shanghai and Ningbo harbors, and the Pearl River Delta in south China covering GuangZhou and Beihai harbors.

Coastal harbors handled a total of 1.25 billion tons of goods last year, keeping an annual growth rate of 9.7 percent in five years. Shanghai Harbor leads the way with more than 200 million tons annual throughput, followed by Ningbo and GuangZhou with 100 million each, and then Qingdao, Tianjin, Dalian and Qinhuangdao each hitting the 100-million-ton mark in 2001.

The inland waterway network is taking shape, with a backbone of systems around the Yangtze, the Yellow, the Pearl and the Heilong-Songhua Rivers. The total lengthen of inland waterway courses was close to 120,000 km by the end of 2000, of which 46 percent were navigable.

The ports along inland rivers handled a total of 814 million tons of goods in 2000.