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CONCRETE
evidence is emerging that China's deep commitment
to infrastructure building in the last decade
is paying off in answering the call to have
the wealth of the coastal regions move inland
to less affluent interior.
This
evidence comes with the news that the Port
of Shanghai's river-sea intermodal container
transshipments have increased 12 per cent
year on year to 7.6 million TEU in the first
half, faster than the port's total container
volume that posted 2.9 per cent growth rate.
This
means factories are being established deep
in the interior and the goods they produce
are being moved to the Shanghai for export
at prices which win them slots on ships
going for retail shelves the world over
- or else these cheerful numbers would not
be forthcoming as they are.
Shanghai
handled 16.32 million TEU in the first half
of 2013 and the river trade proportion climbed
3.8 per cent year on year to 46.6 per cent
of the total container volume, keeping Shanghai
ahead of its target of having the river
trade share reach 45 per cent of the whole
by 2015.
We
have heard much of railway development in
recent years, and while progress in the
rail sector undoubtedly surpasses anything
in the world, there have been less note
made of the great strides in less eye-catching
waterway development.
In
length and breath, Yangtze River is like
the Mississippi with two shallow broad,
muddy streams that flow across continents,
one from the highlands in the north of the
United States from waters flowing from the
Rocky Mountains to the west and from the
Canadian Shield to the north. The Yangtze
and its tributaries are fed by waters running
off the high plateau of Chongqing and westward,
and from the mountains north and south of
the river to feed its every tributary as
it meanders eastward to Shanghai.
What
has limited the resulting river trade in
both cases was partly a lack of business
and trade flow partly because bigger ships
could not navigate the rivers and were of
insufficient size to achieve the economies
of scale demanded to keep prices from factory
door to western retail shelf low enough
to make the trade.
The
increase in trade upstream, brought by intense
dredging and river port upgrades to achieve
cost-savings at intermodal transfer points
far from the coast, indicates that things
are working as planned. Shanghai also attributes
the rapid rise in river trade transshipments
to its development of the new Yangshan international
shipping hub and its effort to attract mega
ships, which keep unit prices low.
In
the first half of the year, Shanghai's international
container transshipments soared 32.7 per
cent to 1.18 million TEU.
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