Analysis Of Port Distribution Characteristics And Influencing Factors Along The 21st Century Maritime Silk Road

The 21st Century Maritime Silk Road(hereinafter referred to as the Maritime Silk Road)is one of the two major components of China’s “Belt and Road" initiative.It aims to build a platform for maritime cooperation and promote exchanges between countries.The proposal has so far received wide international attention and response.Ports are the basic guarantee for achieving maritime interconnection.Understanding the distribution,development rules and influencing factors of ports along the Maritime Silk Road is conducive to the investment and construction of ports and the development of mutual cooperation.Based on this,this paper analyzes and studies the distribution characteristics and influencing factors of ports along the Maritime Silk Road.Based on container throughout data from 2008-2018,This paper first analyzes the current status and development differences of ports along the Maritime Silk Road from the national and regional levels.Then with the main ports as the representatives,this article use rank-size law to study the scale structure of the ports,and study the change of the center through the standard deviation ellipse,and then use the spatial autocorrelation method to analyze the spatial agglomeration characteristic of the ports.The result shows that the scale of ports along the Maritime Silk Road is unevenly distributed in space,forming an "Asia-Pacific-led" spatial pattern.East Asia,especially China’s coastal ports,are high-value clusters,and low-value clusters are mainly in Mediterranean coastal ports.The overall scale structure of the ports is stable,and the center is constantly moving to the southeast.The ports of East and Southeast Asia have maintained rapid development.They are also the core area of the construction of the Maritime Silk Road initiative.Their port container throughout has been in a leading position for nearly ten years.Then,the line data was used to construct a port network.From the perspective of network centrality and community structure,the ports along the Maritime Silk Road were analyzed.There is a hierarchical structure in the port network,and only a few ports have high centrality.Most ports need to be connected to other ports through highly centralized ports.The comprehensive centrality of Hong Kong Port and Singapore Port ranks in the top two,which is of great significance,and can fully play its pivotal role in the Maritime Silk Road.Shenzhen Port and Shanghai Port are the two major hub ports in China.The southern port of China is more central than the northern ports in the port network of the Maritime Silk Road.The ports along the route can be divided into six communities.The connection between ports is still dominated by neighboring areas,while the hub port mainly assumes the role of cross-regional connections in the entire network.Finally,the influencing factors of the port system are analyzed.After selecting representative indicators,this paper measure the contribution of each influencing factor through geographical detector to see which influencing factor is the relative importance.Different influencing factors have different influences on the port development.Generally speaking,the external environment of the port has a greater impact on the port development than port’s basic condition.Results from the geographical detector show the port’s network centrality,GDP,trade and service exports have significance influence on port system.The contribution of the port’s network centrality is found higher than others both in factor detector and interaction detector,highlighting its importance.Improving the port’s network centrality can effectively promote the development of the port.In addition,from the result of interaction detector,it can be seen that port development is the result of the combined effect of different factors.Although the power of single factors such as channel water depth is not strong,the power is significantly enhanced after taken together with other factors.Therefore,when formulating relevant measures for port development,comprehensive consideration can be made around the main factors and auxiliary factors.