Research On The Position Of Chinese Container Ports In The Global Shipping Network

With the development of container liner shipping and the economical trade globalization,ports,which used to act as land-sea connections,have already turned into a critical part of the global supply chain,and play a very important role in the national economy.As far as container throughput is concerned,Chinese container ports have already had strong strength.However,the intensified economic globalization,sluggish trade development and the increasing influence of shipping alliance,are requiring more for the development of Chinese container ports.As any port cannot exist in isolation,the competitiveness of a container port is reflected in their comprehensive capabilities compared with other ports.The global liner shipping network,which can be abstracted from liner companies’ port selection and transportation capacity allocation,is the basis for investigating port status.In order to reveal the position of China’s container ports in the global liner shipping network,this paper mainly carries out the following innovative researches from the perspective of complex network:.(1)Based on shipping services among 992 ports referring to TOP 30 liner shipping companies,the weighted global liner shipping network is built as follows:the ports are the nodes and inter-ports links form edges.The weight of an edge is the closeness of connection between two nodes which is measured as an abstraction of the total container traffic between two ports,overcoming the difficulty in obtaining data.(2)Based on the global shipping network,combined with a geographic space view,the social network analysis methods are mainly used.The position of Chinese container ports included in it are evaluated from the three aspects such as topological structure importance,location importance,and economic importance based on the complex network theory,which makes the evaluation more comprehensive and objective.(3)Multiple Linkage Analysis is applied to abstract significant flows in global shipping network.And a quantitative method is put forward to determine whether the competitive relationship between two ports exists and what it is like.Competition network of global container ports is built,based on which,the competition situation of Chinese container ports is analyzed.