Research On Development Route And Function Mechanism Of Wuhan Shipping Center

Resource-economical and environment-friendly society desire that transportation is eco-friendly. Striving to develop water transportation accords with the basic essence of resource-economical and environment-friendly society as water transportation has the characteristics of great volume, covering less and low energy consumption. As the Yangtze River is the first river of China, it is an important measure to develop the shipping function of the golden waterway. The lower reaches of Yangtze River has been developed well, the state has put forward strategic guideline of constructing Wuhan shipping center and Chongqing shipping center to further develop the middle reaches and the upstream segment of the Yangtze river, Wuhan has also declare that it would complete the construction of Wuhan shipping center in a decade. So it has important theoretical value and practical significance to evaluate the developing ability of Wuhan shipping center, find out the best developing route and make clear its function mechanism.This paper firstly discusses the connotation of Wuhan shipping center and simply analyzes its current situation. Then it evaluates the developing ability of Wuhan shipping center through compare of Wuhan, Chongqing, Yueyang, Jiujiang, Shanghai and Hong Kong and gets the result that the shipping market of Wuhan is poor. According to the evaluation result, it chooses route II whose major characteristic is market cultivation and would made clear its function mechanism from hard power and soft power. Hard power:Analysis results demonstrate that Wuhan has obvious first mover advantage when Stan Kerr’s model applies to port group in the middle reach of the Yangtze River. Wuhan, who has evident network economy features, will become the inland water cargo center and the container hinge port. According to the enterprise market boundary expansion model, port enterprises of Wuhan are short of market expansion ability, on the contrary, shipping enterprises have strong market expansion ability. Soft power:It divides modern shipping service industry into upstream and middle-low stream and analyzes their function mechanism. Upstream industry is represented by shipping trade and shipping financial, middle-low stream industry is represented by port shipping service industry chain and vessel-cargo network. Finally, it puts forward policy proposals for development of Wuhan shipping center.