Yangtze River Delta Inland Shipping (1950-1980) The Rise And Fall Process

The Yangtze River Delta is a typical place of plain water system areas, rivers crisscrossing the region, scattered with lakes. The inland water transportation played a very important role in the transportation system of the region and its development level increased at first, and then grow slowly, fast to the peak, fell rapidly, and at last upturned slowly during the30years from1950to1980, due to the deep interaction with the regional society economy. However, it still had a rising trend in terms of a30-year scale. Meanwhile, The importance of inland water freight was under attack of the bottleneck of itself and other transportation form such as road an railway, but it was not be defeat all the time.Based on the files of transit authority, this paper focused on the empirical study of the situation and the rise and fall of inland water transportation in the Yangtze River Delta from1950to1980, built the database of the1950-1965inland water transportation in the region, thereby reproduced the development path and explained the laws of the inland water transportation in the region by analyzing the changes of importance in the whole transportation system.