Spatial Structure Of The Northeast Asian Container Port System Evolution

The growth of regional and world economy gives rise to the birth and development of seaports. Seaports were the transit interface in the early industrialization. Large quantities of industries dependent on ocean shipping concentrated in seaboard due to the development of industrialization. Since the function of seaports has expanded into the fields of industry and commerce, seaports have become the basis of transportation and production; thus the development of seaports is of great significance to the progress of regional and national economy. In recent decades the boom in container transportation by sea has a great impact on the evolution of global port system. Especially since 1980's North-east Asia has became one of the most flourishing areas of container transportation worldwide owing to the rapid globalization, prosperous international trade and the transfer of the manufacture center to Asia Pacific area.The rapid development of the seaports in North-east Asia interests the researchers. However, current researches on port system of North-eash Asia were mainly focused on the comparison of the physical and operational levels and the analysis of competition dynamics in a certain time section most with qualitative analysis. There is still no such a research that studies the evolvement of throughput centralization and the transfer of traffic center of the port system of North-east Asia in a long time span by several quantitative analysis tools from the dimensions of both time and sapce and summarize the development regularity of the port system of North-east Asia in comparison with the evolvement model of port system of westen Europe and North America so as to propose development strategies for Chinese ports. This paper firstly divides the evolution process from 1985 to 2005 of North-east container port system into three phases as diffusion, transition and concentration in terms of the throughput of 11 leading container ports in North-east Asia and then quantitatively analyses the process mechanism of the Gini coefficient of North-east Asia container ports by means of shift-share analysis and Gini coefficient decomposition. An evolution model of spatial structure of North-east Asia container port system is developed based on the quantitative analysis after the review and summation of the historical process of North-east Asia container ports and the comparision with Hayuth model. And then the development tendency of some leading ports in North-east Asia is predicted according to BCG Matrix analysis that Shanghai is bound to become the load center of North-east Asia port system, Busan will withdraw from the competition for the status of load center and become a peripheral port in the he port system of North-east Asia, Japanese ports are on the decline and some of main ports will be reduced to feeder ports. This paper ends up with two proposals for Chinese ports to implement free port policy and develop container transportation of Ocean-Rail Through Traffic.